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THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IS A CON struction of literary historians, and in this chapter I con sider the processes by which it was made. I also address the question of why epochal breaks come when they do. Why, in other words, do literary historians generally agree that a new period, named romanticism, begins in English literature around the turn of the nineteenth cen tury. If, as I think, the answer is partly that there is a nec essary inertia in these matters - in other words, we con tinue to perceive epochal breaks in the same places where they have once been seen -the questions then be come, who first identified the epochal break that is now accepted? what led them to do so? and why did their con temporaries agree with them? This chapter also highlights the relation - or gap between two different moments in the making of clas sifications. On the one hand, there is the positing of an epochal break or, in the case of a literary movement, the grouping of authors or texts. On the other hand, there is the characterizing of the epoch or group. The latter involves conceptualizing the classification that has been made. A literary historian always pursues these moments simultaneously, reasoning in a hermeneutic circle from a concept to a set of texts and from the set of texts to the concept. But at the level of literary history as an institu tion, as the collective effort of many literary historians, 85
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I S LITERARY HISTORY P0SSIB LE ?
these moments can separate. There can be consensus in perceiving an epoch or movement long before there is any consensus in characterizing it. In the creation of English romantic poetry as a classification, the grouping of the poets and the development of the concept of roman ticism were partly independent processes. Not until the 1890s was the concept of romanticism generally used to interconnect all of the English poets of the early part of the century. The history of the classification English romantic poetry has been narrated by Wellek in 1949 and by Whal ley in much more detail in 1972. 1 Writing when they did, neither Wellek nor Whalley had occasion to emphasize certain aspects of the subject: the self-periodization of the early nineteenth century; the interpretive tradition throughout the century that connected the revolution in poetry to the one in France; the break in this tradition at the end of the nineteenth century, when, for most read ers, romanticism first became the name for this move mentj the ideological character of the classification; and the significance of it as background to some types of his toricist criticism of the romantic poets at present. As critics have pointed out,2 fundamental premises of literary history as a discipline come to us from the roman tic period. Among these are the importance attached to beginnings or origins, the assumption that a develop ment is the subject of literary history, the understanding of development as continual rather than disjunctive, and the creation of suprapersonal entities as the subjects of this development. Therefore, if we were to trace the ori gin and development of these premises, we would be writ1 Rene Wellek, "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 128-98; George Whalley, "England: Romantic-Romanticism, " in "Romantic" and Its Cognates, ed. Hans Eichner (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972) 157-62. 2 Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988); Cynthia Chase in conversation.
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ing a romantic type of literary history, though at a higher level of reflection. A narrative history of the classifica tion of English romantic poetry may also be a romantic project. To the narrative I am about to tell, there is, how ever, a more telling objection. Since I argue in chapter 2 that narrative literary history cannot represent the past, it is self-contradictory to make the attempt. We shall have to ponder the justification of this narrative after it has been made. Classificatory constructions, such as movements, genres, traditions, and periods, have three parts: a name, a concept or characterization (what romanticism is), and a canon of writers or set of texts included in the classifi cation. I shall scarcely deal with the changing canon and concept, but shall ask how and why very diverse writers were amalgamated into a movement and how this move ment was named romantic.3 Some familiar points must be noted. In England be tween 1 798 and 1824, the term romantic did not desig nate a contemporary literary movement or period. The adjective was widely current, and meant wonderful, exo tic, like a medieval romance. After 1813, the influential distinction of the Schlegel brothers between classical lit erature or culture and the romantic or modern was known to English critics, but in this distinction romantic or modern referred to the literature of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.4 The poets we now group together seemed very different. On the whole, they disliked each 3 Recent history of this classification, with reference to disputes over periodization since 1940, is surveyed by Mark Parker, "Measure and Countermeasure: The Lovejoy·Wellek Debate and Romantic Periodiza tion," in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cam bridge: Harvard UP, 1991) 227-47. 4 The Schlegels' seminal comparison of the ancient or classical and the romantic or modern was known to Crabb Robinson by 1803, to Cole ridge by 1 8 12, and to a great many other persons after Madame de Stael's Germany and A. W Schlegel's Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art were published in English translations in 1813 and 1 8 1 5, respectively. See Her bert Weisinger, "English Treatment of the Classical-Romantic Prob-
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other at least as much as they were friendly and admir ing. To the poets and their contemporaries, their relative standing at present would have seemed time's incompre hensible caprice. The canon of contemporary poets in 1820 generally began with Byron, Scott, Campbell, Words worth, and Moore. Blake was unknown; Shelley and Keats had few readers; the genius of Coleridge as a poet was not widely recognized. There were taxonomies, of course. Reviewing South ey's Thalaba, the Destroyer in 1802, Francis Jeffrey grouped Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb to gether as a "sect of poets. liS References to this school grad ually became common in the literature of the time, and by 1814 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were famili arly known as the Lake poets.6 In 1817, in a move frankly modeled on Jeffrey's, John Gibson Lockhart invented the Cockney school of poetry, writing a series of notoriously abusive articles in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. This school had Leigh Hunt for its chief and included Keats and John Hamilton Reynolds; according to John Wil son, Hazlitt was the cockney mouthpiece.7 In Lockhart's lexicon, cockney implied low birth, poor education, bad taste, vulgarity, and affectation- an ill-bred aping of the tastes and manners of superiors. This snobbish classifica tion was motivated, as Lockhart frankly says, by ideolog ical hostility. The conservative Lockhart wrote to anni hilate the radical Leigh Hunt, and was perhaps the more inflamed at a time when riots and conspiracies among workers and the government's use of agents provocateurs had newly fanned political passions. (Lockhart also had commercial motivations for journalistic violence, since he and John Wilson had just been hired to revive Blackiem," MLQ 7 (1946); 477-88; Wellek, Concepts of Criticism 145-47; Whalley 199-216. 5 Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 1 (Oct. 1802); 64. " John Taylor Coleridge, Quarterly Review 11 (Apr. 1814); 1 78. 7 John Wilson, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 13 (Apr. 1823); 457.
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wood's Edinburgh Magazine. ) The Cockney school was occasionally repeated as a taunt, especially by reviewers in Blackwood's, but, unlike the Lake school, it was never taken seriously as a literary classification. The same may be said of Southey's invention, in the preface to his The Vision of Judgment (1821), of the satanic school of poets. Readers understood that this was merely another episode in the long enmity of Southey and Byron. Since the Lake school was accepted as a meaningful classification and had a long career in literary history, we may look further into its creation. It derives, as I said, from one influential critic, Francis Jeffrey.s In making this classification, Jeffrey was guided by bibliographical and biographical information. Coleridge had inserted lines of his own in Southey's Joan of Arc; the second edi tion of Coleridge's Poems ( 1 797) included lyrics by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd; the Lyrical Ballads ( 1 798) was a joint publication of Wordsworth and Cole ridge; Coleridge, Southey, and their families shared a house in Keswick, and Coleridge frequently visited Wordsworth in Grasmere. Knowing that they were person ally associated, Jeffrey found similarities of "style and manner" in their poetry: simplicity of form and language, love of nature, longing for the ideal, and "paradoxical morality."9 Jeffrey read the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads as the program for a new poetry. Among Jeffrey'S motives in making this classification, an ideological one was prominent. This "sect of poets," he said, "are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism . . . . A splenetic and idle discontent • But Jeffrey's classification was vaguely anticipated by an anony mous reviewer in the Monthly MirIOr 11 (June 1801): 389: "The new school of philosophy . . . has introduced a new school of poetry." It is not clear which poets the reviewer had in mind, but he finds in their poems "a romantic search after simplicity." 9 Edinburgh Review 1 (Oct. 1802): 64. See Jeffrey's subsequent account of his reasons for classifying these poets together in Edinburgh Review 28 (Aug. 18 17): 509.
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with the existing institutions of society, seems to be at the bottom of all their serious and peculiar sentiments." l 0 To compare them to Dissenters was not yet to call them revolutionaries, but the Dissenters lived under political and social disabilities and were frequently associated with radical causes and agitation. In politics, Jeffrey was a moderate Whig, a gradualist, who wanted reform but not sudden and drastic change that would tear the social fabric. In 1802, bread shortages were intensifying popular unrest. The poor might be supposed to be seditious and so might writers who sympathized with the poor. In 1802, the French Revolution naturally magnetized Jeffrey's thoughts and emotions; in fact, he referred to it in the same issue of the Edinburgh Review (63). In the "discontent" of these poets, who had borrowed some of their "leading principles . . . from the great apostle of Geneva," Jeffrey sensed a state of mind akin to that of the philosophes, the French intellectuals whose writings had contributed to the Revolution. Doctrinaire and subver sive, the poets were the more dangerous if they were a sect, a group, a potential party. Fear of revolution, in other words, did not influence merely Jeffrey'S characterization of them; it also prompted him to see them as a group. Later, Jeffrey made the analogy to the revolutionists more clearly, as though he became gradually more con scious of it and more alarmed. In 1805, he reviewed Southey's Madoc and took the occasion to comment on "the ambition of Mr. Southey and some of his associates." Their ambition was not "of that regulated and manage able sort which usually grows up in old established commonwealths" but was "of a more undisciplined and revolutionary character," which "looks, we think, with a jealous and contemptuous eye on the old aristocracy of the literary world."J J !O II
Edinburgh Review 1 (Oct. 1802): 7 1 . Edinburgh Review 7 (Oct. 1805): 1.
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The Lake school, then, was a classification created by one critic. External facts suggested to Jeffrey that there was a group and gave him the canon of poets to be in cluded in itj with these in mind, he perceived similarities of style and manner in the poets' texts. In his 1802 review of Southey, he reasoned in a hermeneutic circle, going to and fro between his concepts of the group and their texts. Ideological factors motivated his perception that there was a group and determined his hostility to it and his characterization of it. The classification caught on be cause of Jeffrey's prestige as a critic, because it satisfied the need readers always feel to organize the contempo rary literary scene, and because much evidence seemed to confirm it. Once a classification has established itself in the minds of readers, it may continue to be used while the characterization of it changes enormously. By 18 14, the Lake school was a generally accepted classification and no longer necessarily hostile. It had a long life in lit erary history and finally died as a classification into the more comprehensive one of romanticism - the romantic movement. 1 2 But the Lake school included only a few of the writers we now group together as romantic. A ground was created in England in the 18 10s for the later move that united almost all writers of the age in one classification. We do not derive our concept of periods directly from the roman tics, but from Dilthey by way of German Geistesge schichte around the turn of this century. But the ro mantics entertained the concept of a literary/cultural period as we now possess it - or possessed it until re cently, since periodization is currently under searching question. This concept is, as Teesing puts it, of a "tract of time that is relatively unified and different from others in a characteristic way"j "a time section," to quote Wellek 12 Whalley (220-30) narrates the history of the critical construction of the Lake school.
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again, "dominated by a system of literary norms, stan dards, and conventions."13 No one has put better than Shelley the concept of a period as a Wirkungszusammenhang, to use Dilthey's word, as a complex of interrelated effects: "There must be a resemblance," says Shelley, "which does not depend on their own will between all the writers of any particu lar age. They cannot escape from subjection to a common influence which arises out of an infinite combination of circumstances belonging to the times in which they live, though each is in a degree the author of the very influ ence by which his being is pervaded."14 In the histories of English poetry planned first by Pope and then by Gray, though written by neither, the divi sions of the material would not have been by periods but by "schools," a taxonomic category borrowed from discus sions of painting. Pope would have noticed the school of Spenser, the school of Donne, and so forth, and in a letter to Warton, Gray, who had a copy of Pope's plan, set forth a similar one of his own. After the poetry of the Celts and of the Goths, which is characterized by racial qualities, Gray perceived a succession of schools: the school of Pro vence (Chaucer to Dunbar), the second Italian school (Sur rey, Wyatt, et al.), and the school of Spenser, which "ends in Milton." Eighteenth-century poetry belonged to the "School of France introduced after the Restoration . . . which has continued down to our own times."IS The romantic concept of period inherited the histori1 3 H. P. H. Teesing, Das Problem der Perioden in der Literaturge schichte (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1949) 8; Rene Wellek and Austin War ren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) 277. 1 4 P. B. Shelley, Preface to "The Revolt of Islam," in Selected Poems. Essays, and Letters, ed. Ellsworth Barnard (New York: Odyssey, 1944) 524; d. preface to "Prometheus Unbound, " 95: "Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age. From this subjec tion the loftiest do not escape." 1 5 Thomas Gray, Correspondence, ed. Paget Toynbee et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935) 3 : 1 1 23-24. For further discussion of these projects see
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cal sophistication and relativism that had been growing in England over the last hundred years. 16 Gradually, but with massive effect, similar ideas were received from Ger many, especially from Herder and the Schlegels. It might seem that a strong interest in periodization necessarily presupposes a commitment to historical relativism. But intellectuals in England were not yet thoroughgoing his torical relativists, as is illustrated in the brief literary his tories offered by Jeffrey and Shelley. I 7 Both share the enthusiastic rhetoric and newer tastes of their times Jeffrey in his ardor for the Elizabethans and Shelley for Petrarch and Dante also. But both adhere to the tradi tional assumption that the norms of poetic excellence are universal and unchanging. Hence, their histories of poetry are of declines and revivals, of the footsteps of poetry recur rently departing from the world and returning. They did not assume, as the Schlegels already did, that the poetry of different times and places is incommensurable, embody ing completely different but equally valid ideals, and that the poetry of each period is to be appreciated from within its own system of values. In romantic England, the interest in self-periodization - in recognizing their time as a period and in characterizing its unity-was not stimulated primarily by relativistic premises. There was a more specific and immediate factor. In the early nineteenth century there were many dis cussions of "the spirit of the age." Some of these are noted by Wellek in "The Concept of Romanticism," others by M. H. Abrams in "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," and more recently by Abrams in "Revolution ary Romanticism 1790-1990: Introduction."1 8 Whether Renee Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1941) 162-65. 16 See Wellek 52-53, 58-65, 103, 139, 162-65. 17 Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 18 (Aug. 1 8 1 1 ) :275-84; P. B. Shelley, "A De fence of Poetry," in Selected Poems 541-56. 1 8 Wellek, Concepts of Criticism 152-56; M. H. Abrams, "English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age," in The Correspondent Breeze:
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such passages refer only to the poetry of the age or to the age in general, they all testify to a sense that the times were new, unified, and different from any past epoch. For the sense that their own age was a period, the over whelming reason was, as Abrams says, the French Revolu tion or, more exactly, the extent to which this event pre occupied thought and emotion. 19 It made a break in his torical continuity. If one did not feel this oneself, one was persuaded by Edmund Burke, who was able, as has been said, to "sway the intelligent as a demogogue sways a mob." There had been, Burke emphasizes, nothing like it in the past. The Revolution opened a new epoch of his tory. And whether one favored or abhorred the Revolu tion, a great many other events or manifestations in contemporary social and cultural life could be, and were, related to it by contemporary interpreters. The Revolu tion was, in their eyes, a universal cause, a factor in most of the powerful tendencies of the time, a ground of the unity of their age. Whatever the political allegiance of the essayist, the spirit of the age was always described as impatient of authority and limits, and this spirit was said also to ani mate literature. Other determinants of the age such as, in Jeffrey's analysis, "the rise or revival of a general spirit of methodism in the lower orders" and the extent "of our political and commercial relations, which have . . . famil iarized all ranks of people with distant countries, and , great undertakings/ reinforced the "agitations of the Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984) 44-46; M. H. Abrams, "Revolutionary Romanticism 1790-1990: Introduction," Bucknell Review, forthcoming. For additional remarks of a similar kind see the Critical Review 5, 4th ser. (Feb. 1 8 14): 144; Francis Jeffrey, Edin burgh Review 23 (Apr. 1814): 200-201; Leigh Hunt, Preface to Foliage, or, Poems Original and Ttanslated, in Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, ed. L. H. and C. W. Houtchens (New York: Columbia UP, 1956) 129-30; John Wilson, Black wood's Edinburgh Magazine 7 (May 1820): 206; Gen eral Weekly Register (30 June 1822): 501-2. 1 9 Correspondent Breeze 44-47; "Revolutionary Romanticism."
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French Revolution" and contributed to the same tenden cies. All these factors, including the "impression of the new literature of Germany," worked together to create "an effectual demand for more profound speculation, and more serious emotion than was dealt in by writers of the former century."20 "The last half-century has produced," said the Critical Review, "as great a revolution in the world of fiction as of fact. Within that time established customs have been set aside, grave opinions derided, and the bounds of poetic license extended beyond the limits of ordinary vision. Lord Byron is one of the mighty spirits who lead the revolt."2 l For a final statement, we can turn again to Jeffrey in 1814: This is the stage of society in which fanaticism has its sec ond birth, and political enthusiasm its first true develop ment- when plans of visionary reform, and schemes of boundless ambition are conceived . . . the era of revolutions and projects - of vast performances, and infinite expecta tions. Poetry . . . becomes more enthusiastic, authoritative and impassioned; and feeling the necessity of dealing in more powerful emotions than suited the tranquil and frivo lous age which preceded, naturally goes back to those themes and characters which animated the energetic lays of its first rude inventors . . . . This is the age to which we are now arrived.22
Metaphors control perceptions, and the spirit of the age must obviously unite all writers of the time, however different they may seem. So far as I know, this point was first made explicitly with reference to the contemporary poets by John Wilson in 1820: "The age has unquestion ably produced a noble band of British Poets - each separ ated from all the rest by abundant peculiarities of style and manner . . . [but 1 all of them bound together . . . by rich participation in the stirring and exalting spirit of the 20 Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 27 (Sept. 1816): 8. 21
Critical Review 5, 4th ser. (Feb. 1814): 144.
22 Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 23 (Apr. 1814): 200-201.
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same eventful age . . . all kindred to each other by their part in the common Soul and Thought of the time."23 Here the grouping of the poets is already accomplished, though the classification still has no name and hardly any characterization attached to it. Wilsons canon is Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge. The first person to describe the new move ment with anything like the canon that prevailed until recently was Leigh Hunt in an 1816 article, on "Young Poets," in The Examiner. Observing that "there has been a new school of poetry rising of late, which promises to extinguish the French one that has prevailed among us since the time of Charles the 2nd.," Hunt indicates that the established members of the school are Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Byron, and that the young poets, Shelley, Keats, and John Hamilton Reynolds, "promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school."24 Hunt's intention, of course, was to boost the reputations of Shelley, Keats, and Reynolds, with whom he was friendly and politically allied. Ideology influenced his canon as much as it did Wilsons more conservative one. An ironical result of this periodization, as it first devel oped, was that, though by the 18 1Os, Wordsworth, Cole ridge, and Southey had long been politically conservative, and Scott had never been anything else, there was a ten dency to cast them all in the role of revolutionaries, because of their participation in the spirit of the age. The first person25 to name this new school romantic was Taine in 1863, who had a section called "The Roman tic School" in his History of English Literature. Taine may simply have extended the by then familiar notion of the Lake school to cover all the writers of the period, for he quotes Jeffrey's 1802 article on the "sect" of "dissenters 23 John Wilson, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 7 (May 1820): 206. 24 Leigh Hunt, "Young Poets," Examiner (I Dec. 1816): 76l. 25 I omit the Austrian police spy, cited by Wellek (Concepts of Crit
icism 148), who "reported that Byron belongs to the Romantici and 'has written and continues to write poetry of this new school.'"
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in poetry," and as he begins to characterize the romantic school, his generalizations apply particularly to Words worth, Coleridge, and Southey. Or Taine may have been influenced by the idea of the spirit of the age. But mainly he was constructing the English romantic school on the model of the French, which had already been recognized as a classification: "Now appeared the English ro�antic school, closely resembling the French."26 Taine's description of this school pertains as much to German and French romanticism as to British. He empha sizes, for example, historical relativism as a romantic con cept and the extent to which philosophy enters literature. He hardly mentions the romantic orientation to nature until he discusses Shelley. The specifically English qual ity of the school is its intellectual timidity; its range of speculation is limited by moral and religious commit ments. Taine's history was not translated into English until 1871 and had, at first, little impact. The major Victorian critics -Masson, Arnold, Swin burne, Bagehot, Morley, Stephen, Pater-did not refer to an English romantic movement, though they wrote abun dantly about the poets. Neither did the literary histori ans, Margaret Oliphant (1882), Saintsbury ( 1896), and Garnett and Gosse (1903-4), though they all use roman tic as an adjective for this or that tendency or effect in the literature.27 To refer to the writers collectively, they tended to use the familiar terms school or age, speaking of the Lake school, the age of Wordsworth, and so forth; the concept of "the age of . . . " seems to hover between 26 Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature (New York: Frede· rick Ungar, 1965) 3:422. 27 Margaret Oliphant, Literary History of England between the End of the Eighteenth and the Beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries. 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1882); George Saintsbury, A History of Nine· teenth Century Literature (1 780-1895) (London: Macmillan, 1896); Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse, English Literature: An Illustrated Record, vol. 4, From the Age of Johnson to the Age of Tennyson (London: William Heinemann, 1903).
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that of a period and that of a school headed by a famous artist. In Pater's Appreciations (1889), the postscript, which was first published as "Romanticism" in 1876, notes that in Germany and France the term romantic "has been used to describe a particular school of writers . . . at a particular period," the implication being that the term was not used this way in England.28 On the other hand, David Moir speaks in 1852 of the "purely romantic school" of Scott, Coleridge, Southey, and Hogg, and there is a similarly nebulous reference in Rushton in 1863 and in the work of Shaw as revised by Smith in 1 864. In 1873, Dewey refers to the "Romantic School" of Byron, Scott, and Moore; and G. M. Hopkins, in an 1881 letter to Dixon, refers to the "Romantic school" of Keats, Hunt, Hood, and Scott.29 These are vague, brief remarks, and for none of these critics does the romantic school include all of the major poets in the first decades of the century. But in 1885, in The Liberal Movement in English Literature, which first appeared as a series of essays in the National Review, W J. Courthope says, "I might, indeed, have called the series 'The Roman tic Movement in English Literature."'3D To explain why this would have been a possible title, Courthope refers to 28
Walter Pater, Appreciations (London: Macmillan, 1910) 243. David Macbeth Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half Century (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1851) 17; William Rushton, "The Classical and Romantic Schools of English Literature: As Represented by Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Scott, and Wordsworth," in The Afternoon Lectures on English Literature (London: 1863); Thomas Budd Shaw, New History of English Literature, rev. Truman J. Backus (New York: Sheldon, 1878); this is a revision of Shaw's Outlines of English Literature, rev. William Smith (London: John Murray, 1864); J. Dewey, A Comparative Estimate of Modern English Poets (1873), cited in Samuel C. Chew, Byron in England: His Fame and After-Fame (Lon don: John Murray, 1924) 292; Claude Colleer Abbot, ed., The Correspon dence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Watson Dixon, rev. ed. (London: Oxford UP, 1955) 98. 30 William John Courthope, The Liberal Movement in English Liter ature (London: John Murray, 1885) viii. 29
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the now familiar distinction, inherited from the Schle gels, of the classical from the late medieval or romantic and argues that both "streams of inspiration" are united in Chaucer and continue as latent tendencies through the history of English literature. There was a "romantic outburst" in the "early part of the present century." The reason Courthope entitled his book The Liberal Movement is, therefore, revealing. He wishes to highlight the political ethos of romanticism, for he sees political events, emotions, and ideas as its primary historical causes. In other words, he still views what we call roman ticism as "the writings of those who, in point of time, fol lowed the French Revolution, and who founded their matter and style on the principles to which that Revolu tion gave birth." Courthope does not approve of this "movement on behalf of liberty"; he writes as a conserva tive, and his argument anticipates that of Irving Babbitt. "Liberal," to him, means individual self-expression, desire to reconstruct society according to an ideal, and belief in "unlimited progress." "The spirit of the age embodies itself in the philosophic isolation of Wordsworth; in the rebellion of Byron against society; in the Utopianism of Shelley" (53, 22, xi, 1 6 1, 224). My point is that Courthope, though a spokesman for the conservatism in English intellectual life toward the end of the nineteenth century, was still interpreting the movement at the start of the century as it had been inter preted for sixty years, as a group of writers who were "united by a common spirit," rebellious, libertarian, and expansive ( 198). Seventeen years earlier, J. C. Shairp said that to refer the "poetic genius" of the early part of the cen tury to the "French Revolution, or to the causes of that Rev olution" is one of "the literary commonplaces."3l Victorian critics used conservatives such as Scott and Coleridge and radicals such as Shelley to voice their own ideologies in 31 J. C. Shairp, Studies in Poetry and Philosophy (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1886) 1. The essay quoted was originally published in 1868.
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their commentaries. But until the last decade of the cen tury, the movement was almost always seen as essentially liberal, radical, or revolutionary, whatever may have been the politics of the individual poets. Later views of roman ticism as politically multiple in its allegiances or as proto Fascist mark a massive break with this interpretive tradi tion, and so do present perceptions of romantic poetry as ideological in a quasi-Marxist sense, as consciously or unconsciously supporting the political status quo. The sixth volume ( 1910) of Courthope's subsequent History of English Poetry is entitled The Romantic Movement in English Poetry: Effects of the French Revolution. It was around the turn of this century that the break in interpre tive tradition took place, and it coincides with the bestow ing of the name romanticism.32 This renaming had causes and consequences too ex tensive to be analyzed in a brief chapter, but several fac tors may be mentioned. For the full understanding of them we must keep in mind the ethos of academic life in those days, for in Great Britain and the United States the school or spirit in question became romantic in the hands of professors. They were of course familiar with the classiclromantic distinction that had been discussed repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century, and it was easy to conflate this with the dichotomy of the French or Augustan school versus the school. that had emerged in the later eighteenth century. They were respectful of con tinental, especially German, scholarship on their subject, and much of this, though not all, referred to a romantic school in England. Probably, like many professors of English, they were provincial in their knowledge of contemporary tendencies in the literary world but much influenced by the lat32 Wellek, Concepts of Criticism 150, says the term romanticism was "fully established" for English literature at the end of the century "in books such as those of W. 1. Phelps and Henry A. Beers"; see also Whal· ley 157, 160.
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est ones of which they were aware. The Pre-Raphaelite view of the romantic poets had an especially large impact on their own conceptions. This was summed up in Theo dore Watts-Dunton's essay on "The Renascence of Won der." This essay was not put together and published until 1904, but the ideas in it were implicit in other essays by Watts-Dunton dating from 1880. Watts-Dunton made the astounding claim that the "Romantic Revival" was not the effect but the cause of the French Revolution. It had this tremendous result because it altered consciousness by reawakening imagination. But Watts-Dunton did not dwell on this claim. He tended, instead, to sever the rela tions between the English romantic movement and polit ical events by dwelling on the craftsmanship of the poets and on wonder as their primary poetic impulse; by won der he meant, in short, medievalism. Pater also contri buted mightily to the depoliticizing and aestheticizing of perceptions of this poetry, as one sees in his famous defini tion of romanticism as "the addition of strangeness to beauty" (246). As a further consideration, there is the simple but important fact that professors in those days were commit ted by the standards of their discipline to positive fact, detail, and qualification. About these diverse poets they found it difficult to make any generalizations, and the political complexion of the movement as a whole seemed a remarkably complicated question. From the joint working of these factors emerged such books as those by C. H. Herford of Manchester Univer sity, C. E. Vaughan of the University of Newcastle-on Tyne, Henry A. Beers and his student William Lyon Phelps, both of them professors at Yale, and Lewis E. Gates of Harvard.33 The two books of Beers, still valuable 33 C. H. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth (London: George Bell, 1897); C. E. Vaughan, The Romantic Revolt (Edinburgh: William Black wood, 1900); Henry A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Henry Holt, 1898) and A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Henry
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for their encyclopedic thoroughness, are entitled A His tory of English Romanticism but are devoted entirely to the medieval revival; and so, for the most part, is Phelps's book, which deals solely with eighteenth-century authors. (Phelps wrote his book, Beers implies, on the basis of Beers's lectures. ) Herford explains that "almost everything of impor tance" in the literature of Wordsworth's time "stood in some relation," not to the French Revolution, as would ear lier have been claimed, but to "the far-reaching and many sided revival of imaginative power commonly known as Romanticism," and "Romanticism is thus the organizing conception of the present volume." Its politics fluctuated "from revolution to reaction," but above all it was escapist. Romanticism, for Herford, was "an extraordinary develop ment of imaginative sensibility" to nature, childhood, peasant life, the Middle Ages, ancient Greece, myth, won der, and romance - all l/strange; ways of escape from the ordinary" (vii, xx, xiv). As for Vaughan, who discusses English literature and the literature of the Continent, the revolt of which he speaks in his title has nothing to do with politics but is against the cramping ethos of the Enlightenment and is in favor of passion, nature, and mystery. Gates takes the same line, arguing that "the Romantic Movement" reas serts "the primacy of the spirit," and that "under this for mula may be brought whatever is most characteristic" in all the writers of the age (18). In such works the connec tion the last century had made between literary and polit ical revolution was quite broken. But two books published at the same time provided an academic culmination to the interpretive tradition of the nineteenth century: Edward Dowden's The French Revolu tion and English Literature ( 1897) and, in the United Holt, 1901); William Lyon Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Roman tic Movement (Boston: Ginn, 1 893); Lewis E. Gates, Studies and Appre ciations (New York: Macmillan, 1900).
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States, Albert Elmer Hancock's The French Revolution and the English Poets (1899). Both authors grounded in the French Revolution the unity of English poetry in the early part of the century but stressed that the poets responded to it in quite different ways. They deployed the Revolution to explain both the conservatism of Coleridge and the radicalism of Shelley. In making so much of the French Revolution as a cau sal factor, Dowden and Hancock were belated. The trend was elsewhere, and the relatively depoliticized romanti cism was to flourish for a while in interpretations, so much so that Dowden, Hancock, and the tradition to which they belonged were often forgotten. When Abrams, in the well-known 1963 essay cited earlier, traced the con nection between "the political, intellectual, and emo tional circumstances of a period of revolutionary up heaval" and "the scope, subject-matter, themes, values and even language of a number of Romantic poems," he empha sized predecessors of his argument (especially Hazlitt) in the romantic period but did not mention that the argu ment was a commonplace of Victorian criticism. He knew this, of course, but doubtless felt that it would not impress the contemporary critics he wished to correct, who "usually ignore" the relations of the English romantic movement "to the revolutionary climate of the time" (46). Dowden and Hancock assumed that there was a roman tic movement but despaired of defining it. "There are," says Hancock, "no principles comprehensive and com mon to all [the poets] except those of individualism and revolt"; the "revolt" in question was not political but against the "literary standards" of the eighteenth cen tury.34 This reluctance to define the unity of a romanti cism that the classification posited was typical of professors at the time, the natural result of caution plus erudition. A. 0. Lovejoy's famous 1924 essay "On the 34 Albert Elmer Hancock, The French Revolu tion and the English Poets (New York: Henry Holt, 1899) 46-47.
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Discrimination of Romanticisms" was in a tradition of per plexity that goes back to the first adoption of the to talizing classification in England and the United States. Thus, the romantic movement was subjected to decon structive impulses from the moment it was constructed. Its political thrust was neutralized in the same moment by Pre-Raphaelite trends in criticism, by the continental point of v: �w of its interpreters, by the effects of positivist scholarshi ), and doubtless also by the ideology of English professors. The "romantic ideology" was formed at this time and not in the romantic period itself. The phrase refers, of course, to Jerome McGann's influential analysis of the doctrine that both the subject matter and the style of poetry are "ideal," that "poetry works at the level of final Ideas," that "one may escape such a world [historical real ity] through imagination and poetry."35 McGann views this doctrine as "ideological" in the Marxist sense of "false consciousness," and attributes this ideology both to the romantic poets and to their critics, especially the New Critics. But though such ideas about poetry are expressed by the romantic poets, along with many contradictory ones, the poetry was usually read, throughout the nineteenth century, as strongly involved in historical reality- and divorced from it only at the end of the nineteenth century. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger points out that the political impact of a poem depends not only on its contents but also on "the way art functions in soci ety." The latter is determined by the "institution of art," which includes the economic and social processes govern ing art's production and distribution and also the assump tions with which it is read. The "institution of art" changes over time and also differs within social gtoups. According to Burger, in nineteenth-century bourgeois soci ety, art has the function of neutralizing social criti35 Terome McGann, The Romantic Ideology; A Critical Investiga tion (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 101, 131.
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cism. All those values, such as "humanity, joy, truth, and solidarity," that could not be "satisfied in everyday life because the principle of competition pervaded all spheres, can find a home in art." There, however, they are con fined to "an ideal sphere." By "realizing the image of a bet ter order in fiction, which is semblance (Schein) only, [art] relieves the existing society of the pressure of those forces that make for change."36 Yet, until the end of the nineteenth century, criticism of the romantic poets suggests a different institution of art. For Victorian critics used the poets to support their own political and ideological commitments. Their percep tions of Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and so forth embody the political controversies of the Victorian world. More over, the Victorian critics assumed that romantic poetry was similarly engaged in the political life of its time. Only toward the end of the nineteenth century does criticism of this poetry begin to reflect what Burger calls "aesthetic ideology," in the same moment in which the poetry was classified as romantic. This development was entirely compatible with the pursuit of Geistesgeschichte, and by the joint working of aesthetic ideology and Geistesgeschichte, romantic po etry was provided with a new context in the past and a new derivation. Romantic poems were no longer related to the French Revolution but, instead, to intellectual and cultural trends in the eighteenth century- the interest in the primitive, in genius, in the psychology of the imagina tion, the medieval revival, comparative mythology, senti mentalism, sensationalism, and associationism. Jerome McGann, David Simpson, Alan Liu, and others are now reacting against this interpretation of romantic poetry with a new historicist contextualism .
.16 Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant·Garde, trans. Michael Shaw and Jochen Schulte·Sasse (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984) 49-50.
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Since this chapter has presented a narrative literary history, it is necessary, in a book of this kind, to reflect critically on this construction. If it tells a true story, it does not support the argument of this book, for the argu ment is that a true story cannot be told. Confronting the strong reasons for such skepticism, many historians and literary historians have retreated to perspectivism as their last stand. Different portraits of the same past may all be accurate, they argue, if the portraits are drawn from different points of view. Or, changing the figure, one might say that each historian follows his own itinerary through the field; the questions asked determine which events are noticed, but the field remains the same. Or, the past is a structure of events, but each historian slices through it at a different angle. Though historians tell dif ferent stories about the same past, the stories are compat ible. Where there is disagreement, further discussion or research will resolve it. However, I question whether any literary history can be credible, even one that is con ceived as perspectival. The narrative just constructed describes three peri ods -that of the initial grouping of the poets, that of Vic torian criticism of them, and that of the end of the cen tury, when English romantic poetry finally became a totalizing classification. Within these periods, some heterogeneity is exhibited, but, on the whole, the narra tive constructs periods much more than it deconstructs them. Thus the narrative fails by the criteria of post modern or poststructuralist historiography. Yet the peri ods are necessary for rhetorical and narrative purposes. They demarcate the amorphous into phases and provide clear oppositions and turns of plot. As it presents the concept of the spirit of the age, the narrative does not challenge the romantic critics who advanced this concept. They said that the age had a spirit, that this was unified, and that its character was deter mined by the French Revolution. M. H. Abrams posi tively endorses these ideas in his famous article on the
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subject. In fact, the cultural manifestations of early nineteenth-century England were no more unified than they ever are. The question then becomes, why did critics at this time so strongly posit the spiritual unity of their age ? Ideological functions may have been served. The real social disharmonies and rampant individualism of the age could be overcome at the level of the spirit. This point is underscored if we contrast the critical interpretations that are made of our own age. We live in a new, postmodernist era, according to many critics, but its character, causes, and cultural worth vary toto caelo as one goes from one description of it to the next.37 Yet, in contrast to the romantic commentators on their own age, our critics generally claim that postmodernism is radically heterogeneous and, moreover, that postmodern man is exceptionally attuned to difference or heterogene ity. In the last clause, I am drawing on Alan Liu's analysis of poststructuralist cultural criticism as detailism. We n . John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion," Atlantic Monthly 220 (Aug. 1967): 29-34; Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan Review 32 (Fall 1965): 505-25, and "Cross the Border-Close that Gap," in American Literature Since 1900, ed. Marcus Cunliffe (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975) 344-66; Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity-An Incom plete Project," in The Anti·Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983); Ihab Hassan, "POSTmod· ernISM," New Literary History 3 (Autumn 1971): 5-30, and The Dis· memberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), and "The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind," Boundary 2 1 (Spring 1973): 547-69; Irving Howe, "Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction," Partisan Review 26 (Summer 1959) : 420-36; Frank Kermode, Continuities (London: Rout ledge and Kegan Paul, 1968); Richard Kostelanetz, On Contemporary Lit· erature (New York: Avon, 1964); Harry Levin, "What Was Modernism ?" Massachusetts Review 1 (Aug. 1960): 609-30, reprinted in Refractions (New York: Oxford UP, 1966); Jean·Franyois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984); Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1965); Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1966); Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963).
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live in an age, Liu says, in which the study of history and of culture is committed to "particularism, localism, re gionalism, relative autonomism, incommensurabilism, accidentalism (or contingency), anecdotalism . . . and 'micro-,' 'hetero-,' and 'poly'-ism,"38 and the description of realities conceived on these premises can only be given in such characteristic postmodern forms as the matrix, the array, or the list- forms, that is, that present an aggre gate of particulars without ordering them. It is not simply that the multiplicity and diversity of particulars precludes intellectual grasp of them, but also that the literary historian deliberately resists grasping them totally. Moreover, in the view of postmodernist cul tural criticism, each particular is itself inhabited by inde terminacy, for each must be interpreted and, hence, can be seen from multiple perspectives and bear innumerable different meanings. Thus the heterogeneity of a post modern period reflects the premises its interpreters would also apply to any other age. The age cannot be grasped in generalizations both because it is (said to be) incoherent and because the would-be generalizers are committed to incoherence as a method of presentation. Since we have no way of know ing, however, whether our age is "really" more incoherent than past ages or not, we must ask why we prefer to insist that it is. If we assume that our age is, in fact, less diverse and more homogenized than previous ones, we would sug gest an answer. The localism, incommensurabilism, and so forth, on which academic cultural commentators in sist, would be an ideological veil to the worldwide ration alization, modernization, and increasing sameness of forms of life. If we applied Hayden White's scheme that derives every historical narrative from one of four tropes,39 irony 38 Alan Liu, "Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodern ism, and the Romanticism of Detail," Representations 32 (Fall 1990): 78. 39 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in
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is the one that pervades my narrative of the construction of English romantic poetry as a classification. Wellek, in contrast, plots the story as the gradual discovery of truths about English poetry in the early nineteenth century- its true leading characteristics and its true essential unity. My narrative exhibits a kaleidoscope or, more precisely, a carousel of changing critical views, and it nowhere sug gests that one view is more correct than another or that time brings a better insight. Neither does it commit itself to the critical comedy that welcomes diversity as pluralism. Moreover, while it tries to explain why we classify the poets together and call them romantic, the narrative also undermines confidence in this classification by showing that it was produced by contingencies. I could speculate as to what desires may be satisfied by this skepticism. But even though we live in an age of confession, such sur mises are better left to others. I merely remark that our struggles are mostly with ourselves, and a person prob ably does not take an ironical view of intellectual history unless he wants to take a more positive one. How, then, shall we decide the historical questions at issue? Are important features of the poetry of Words worth, Shelley, Byron, and the other poets to be explained by their reactions to the French Revolution? And if so, were these reactions essentially similar, so that they pro vide a ground for classifying the poets together and con sidering them as a group? To both of the latter questions, several contemporaries of the poets, such as Francis Jef frey, William Hazlitt, and John Wilson, answered affirma tively. So also did several Victorian critics. Their position was revived in our time by M. H. Abrams and is now widely accepted as a premise. Or should we adopt, instead, the view of Dowden and Hancock at the end of the nineteenth century? They held Nineteen th·Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, pbk., 1975) 31-42.
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that all the poets were deeply influenced by the French Revolution but that its impact on them and on their poetry was widely different in each case. Hence, if we speak of them as a group, the French Revolution cannot be the ground of this synthesis. Jerome McGann, Alan Liu, and many other scholars hold this view at present. They see poems as responses to political or social reality but emphasize the extent to which these responses are particularized and differentiated. Or should we believe, with Watts-Dunton, Beers, Her ford, Vaughan, and most authorities in the field from the 1890s through the 1950s, that the diverse literature that we now call romantic poetry is not to be explained by the French Revolution and that, instead, its causes are to be found in intellectual and cultural trends that became prominent in the eighteenth century? To my mind such questions are unanswerable. More exactly, they cannot be finally resolved by objective methods of historiography, and the positions taken will reflect general ideological convictions. If one sees the alternative narratives that are possible, and the reasons why at various times one or another has been preferred, no narrative can be simply or wholly believable. Yet after they have constructed their narratives, most literary historians believe them. Their sense of convic tion rests, I believe, on grounds that may broadly be called aesthetic. They have integrated many events into a pattern, and the sense of totality and coherence trans forms itself into a sense of truth. From what has been said in this chapter and the last, it seems that literary classifications have little plausibil ity. They do not represent past realities, and only the naive could believe that they do. For how can groupings of books and authors that are based on the inertia of tra dition, on the mere say-so of authors vying with each other for notice, on the uncertain perceptions of literary historians, on their need to construct formal symmetries,
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and on external facts - in other words, not on the objects to be classified but on circumstances adjacent to them have credibility? Or how can a classification formed by contingency after contingency, as was shown in the case of English romantic poetry, have authority for us? Even Dilthey became anxious when he tried to ground and delimit logical subjects. "The problem is, what form it [history] takes when . . . statements are to be made about subjects that are in some sense interconnections of per sons . . . where a boundary is not given in the unity of a personal life, [how is it possible] to find firm demarca tions in this boundless interplay of individual existence. It is as though lines should be drawn in a constantly flowing river."40 Of course, there are differences between the literary texts of, say, 1790 and those of 1990. Reading the texts for the first time, one could place them in their periods. But the objects to be classified are heterogeneousj in observ ing their similarities and differences we must be selec tivej in drawing the boundary lines we must impose a single point of view or a limited set of points of view. In the process of being formed, classifications cease ade quately to represent the past. In this failure, the other determinants of classifications I described, the ones addi tional to the desire for objective accuracy, have room to riot, and classifications become ideological, aesthetic, merely traditional, and motivated by career interests or by whim. Despite the grip of tradition, classifications may change enormously over time. Thanks to the contempo rary women's movement, Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Worth, Amelia Lanyer, and Elizabeth Cary are now not only rec ognized writers but belong to an accepted classification Renaissance women writers. Even though the cockney 40 Wilhelm Dilthey, Del Aufbau del geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schliften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1936) 7:280.
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label pointed to elements in Keats that must be recog nized and assimilated, most of us would be shocked if Keats were now classified with the Cockney school of poets (i.e., with such contemporaries of his as Leigh Hunt and John Hamilton Reynolds) . For the classification em bodies the snobbish values of a social world that is gone. The ideology that produced it conflicts with our own. Even if this were not the case, the classification could not be used. The enormously favorable reception of Keats since the Pre-Raphaelites necessitates a more honorific classification based on other qualities of his verse. For similar reasons, most of us would not now cite the class position of the characters in a drama as a feature by which we discriminate genres, such as tragedy from comedy. Classifications reflect the times that produce them and change as the times change. Should we not, then, simply agree with Croce that lit erary classifications are at best practical conveniences, tools of exposition, helpful for certain jobs, such as sur veys of a field? Depending on which features of a text we emphasize, we place it in different classifications. "Every genuine work of art," Croce typically remarks, "is at the same time naturalistic and symbolic, idealistic, Classical and Romantic."4! Our classifications vary with our inter ests, with the questions we ask about texts, with the aims we pursue. Any classification is valid if it is anchored in some features of the texts. Yet to me this deconstruction seems, in our present historical moment, too easy and predictable to be quite acceptable. We must ask whether there are criteria that would allow us to make distinctions, to judge that one classification has more validity than another. The rules of the discipline -that judgments must be backed up by arguments, that they must be consistent with each other, that sources must be criticized, that relevant facts cannot 41 Quoted in Gian N. G. Orsini, Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1961) 5 1 .
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be ignored -provide one set of criteria. For some persons these criteria are invalid because they are ideological in the sense of a false consciousness. Certainly they presup pose an ontology and epistemology that need not be cred ited and is not universal. However, I addressed this issue in the first chapter and shall think now within the ideol ogy (if it is that) of the discipline. Tradition in literary classification need not be merely blind inertia. It can be modeled positively, as a self corrective dialogue that continues over generations. Once a classification exists, its concept and canon are continually tested against each other in a process that gradually modifies both. As a literary historian groups texts, he compares them with each other and with a tax onomic concept. He is reasoning in a hermeneutic circle. In its negative aspect, reasoning in a hermeneutic circle means that we cannot know what texts are to be clas sified as romantic, for example, unless we have a concept of romanticism. Yet we must derive the concept from romantic texts. But in fact we come into the hermeneutic circle at a certain point, that is, we always find ourselves furnished with preconceptions. A role of cultural tradi tion in taxonomy is to supply such beginning points, and a role of external facts is also to do this and, additionally, to ground the taxonomy in historical realities. The role of reasoning within a hermeneutic circle is to correct the preconceptions. The literary historian reads texts in the light of a taxonomic (pre)conception, and this evokes a nexus of expectations about the texts. If a text does not fully correspond to these expectations, he may conclude either that the text does not belong in this par ticular classification or that his conception of this cate gory should be revised. In the latter case, he will reread the text in the light of his revised conception. If there is still a discrepancy, the conception must again be revised. The process of adjusting the concept to the text is not completely open and unprejudiced, since preconceptions determine to some extent what one sees in the text and
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tend thus to be confirmed. But this is only a tendency, and as they try to apply a concept to a text, literary taxon omers typically encounter difficulties. The labor and anx iety these cause are all the greater because classification requires that the same concept fit many texts. The pro cess I just described must be repeated over and over, with text after text, and it must finally result in a classifica tion concept that, in theory, applies well and equally to all the texts that are included under the concept. Of course, this never happens in fact. If we consider literary history as an institution, a col lective process carried forward through generations, the process of taxonomizing can be viewed as, over time, dia lectical and open-ended. Within the preselected set of texts, the taxonomic concept derived from one text is applied to another, modified to fit the second text, and then revised again to fit both texts. The same process is repeated with the third, fourth, and fifth texts, and so on indefinitely. It may happen that, as the concept is modified, it no longer fits one or more of the texts former ly included under the concept. These will be deleted from the taxonomic set. It also happens that, as a concept is revised, it fits texts that would not have come under the original con cept. Thus the concept changes because the set of texts does, and the set of texts changes because the concept does, and large modifications in both take place over time. Though this process can never completely tran scend its beginning, it is self-correcting and, if there were no other factors involved, would tend toward stable cate gories and consensus. Moreover, when the same set of texts is retaxono mized by successive literary historians, they may come to the same results even though they are working from different points of view. The fact does not necessarily illustrate the might of tradition but may, instead, indi cate that the existing groupings have convincing grounds in the texts themselves. A taxonomy that has withstood
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the pressure of many reexaminations might be granted a certain authority. As Gadamer puts it, a tradition does not persist merely by cultural inertia; "preservation is also an act of reason, though one, to be sure, that is char acterized by its inconspicuousness."42 But the strongest argument that a classification has validity must be drawn from its historical impact. In other words, when a classification has been active in forming works, it is grounded in realities of past life. For brevity, I develop this argument only with reference to the classification of authors into groups. But a closely similar argument could be deployed to justify reference to genres, traditions, and periods. A sorting by genre is valid if the concept of the genre was entertained by the writer and his contemporary readers. For in this case the expectations associated with the concept were effective in forming both the work and the responses to it. It is rea sonable to place Pope in the tradition of Dryden, or Allen Ginsberg with Whitman, since the writers viewed them selves in this way, and this view shaped their styles. The concepts and boundaries of periods are valid if persons liv ing at the time define it as a period, and if the period con cept has real effects in determining the character of texts. In the modern world, and even to some extent in ear lier periods, writers tend to classify themselves. They state their influences and affinities, and very often they present themselves to readers as members of a group: the Ph�iade, Sons of Ben, Parnassians, Pre-Raphaelites, aes thetes, Futurists, Imagists, Objectivists, Gruppe 47. Writ ers have many psychological and career motivations for doing this, and in the modern world these acts of self classification also testify to the role and authority of lit erary history in our society. When a writer classifies him self, he places himself within literary history. Thus, im plicitly, he prefers a claim for survival and attempts to 42 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tiibingen: J. c. B. Mohr, 1986) 286.
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define the terms in which literary history will character ize him. Yet along with all the other motives for forming groups, it may happen that writers sense affinities with each other. They feel they belong together. In this case, the classification is simply a generalization of their feel ing. That an author identifies with a group does not mean, of course, that the identification is total or that it lasts throughout his life. He shares the material circum stances, problems, predecessors, influences, interests, ideals, aims, values, and whatever else that connects the group, but each member does so variously and perhaps only for a period of time. Nevertheless, up to some point, the circumstances and aims of the group are his; when we speak of the group, we are speaking, mutatis mutan dis, of him also. If we start with the individual, we can move to the group through the concept of participatory belonging. There may also be a reception and impact of the group as such. This is especially likely when the group presents itself in joint publications, such as anthologies. But what most brings this about are programmatic statements by the group and critical conceptualizations of it. Such writ ings speak of the group as an entity and attribute to it a history, Weltanschauung, set of aims, and so forth. Thus, they lead readers to perceive and react to a group (or to a concept of one) rather than to an aggregate of different writers. The many American poets who were intrigued by Imagism, and wrote in that style, were not modeling their work on particular poems so much as they were adopting a program, communicated to them by antholo gies, manifestoes, and critical advocacy. In this and similar cases, the use of the classification (Imagism) in a literary history is based on similarities among texts, and the perception of these similarities by the literary historian is activated by knowledge of exter nal facts; that is, the historian knows that the Imagist poets felt themselves to be a group and were so viewed by
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their contemporaries. Similarities among texts resulted from the unified impact of the group on the genesis of texts, and this impact was due to the concept of the group. Thus the processes of creating a classification have effects on the literature that is produced, and these effects provide a basis for the classification. This group reception and impact does not happen only with contemporaries. One thinks of T. S. Eliot's crit ical essays characterizing the Metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century, or of Arthur Symons's The Symbol ist Movement in Literature. That writers have at some time been classified as a group does not of course mean that we always continue to use this classification. Thus we no longer refer to Metaphysical poets, because Eliot's characterization of the style and mentality of this sup posed group applies, as it currently seems to us, only to Donne. (Eliot was under the necessity of perceiving a school of poets because he wanted to make them typical of the seventeenth-century mind, which he wished to contrast with the modern mind.) But Eliot's classification of Metaphysical poets had effects on modern poetry. Hence, though we do not speak of a metaphysical school in the seventeenth century, we may still group poets of the "metaphysical revival" in the twentieth century. That Eliot's critical essays caused poets to imitate certain qual ities of Donne produced similarities in their texts. I cannot agree with Croce that literary classifications are in all cases merely practical conveniences or conven tions or that we can group texts and authors in any way we like with equal legitimacy or lack of it. It is clear that classifications must address our present interests and must therefore change as the present does. Yet a classifi cation that is merely perspectival, that reflects merely the points of view of readers in the present, would be self contradictory in a literary history, since it attempts to describe the past. Between present and past perspectives, the mediating factor is of course tradition. Our present perspectives are formed not only by the needs and inter-
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ests of the present but also by the past. Tradition is our term for the processes that carry the past into our present lives, shaping them. To sum up: in the process of classifying groups, schools, movements, and so on, we may gather certain authors together because they themselves and their con temporaries felt that they belonged together. To classify them together is justified by the principle of participa tory belonging. It is further justified if they had an effect on literary history as a group, as evidenced by the study of impact or reception. The group as such may be said to have had a real existence in the course of events, to have been a cause. Meanwhile, the reading of their works may reveal similarities of style, theme, and Weltanschauung, and these affinities between them may be greater than we see with other writers not in their group, while the differ ences are less. This, admittedly, must be a subjective judg ment. Furthermore, it must be a prejudiced one, since we started with the assumption that they were a group. Yet the judgment may be confirmed by successive gen erations of literary historians, viewing from very different contexts. When a classification fulfills these criteria of re ferring to a group that felt itself to be a group, was effective in history as a group, and created what seems to us a gen uine synthesis of works, it is as valid as a literary classifica tion can be. With these criteria we can measure the rela tive degree of justification for the various classifications that are used. It is, therefore, possible to classify wrongly or badly, and all classifications are not equally valid or arbi trary. By these criteria, English romantic poetry seems to me a classification that is not well groundedi Imagist poetry seems a relatively acceptable one. Of course, the validity of a classification lies ulti mately in similarities among the texts it gathers together. When all has been said that can be said in favor of tradi tion, it can only propose a classification weightilYi it can not confirm its correctness. So also with external facts. For example, authors may perceive resemblances among
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the texts they severally produce, but a literary historian may think their perceptions wrong. Since the question comes finally down to perceptions, any classification can be deconstructed. For obviously, texts are different, how ever similar they may also be. Whether a classification will be adopted and used or deconstructed depends on the literary historian's general premises, institutional inter ests, politics, and so forth. Nevertheless, if such factors are in the end decisive, this end is at some distance. Both as we think about literary classification in a metacritical way and as we practice it, the criteria I mention above are usually allowed their important role. They include quasi objective reasons for or against the acceptance of a given classification.
6 The Explanation of Literary Change: Historical Contextualism
THUS FAR WE HAVE CONSIDERED WHAT MIGHT BE called the organizing of a literary history- the selecting, interrelating, structuring, interpreting, and presenting of information. First the works or authors must be grouped. There is no possibility of ordering the field or understand ing what it contains until the multitude of discrete enti ties are reduced through classification to fewer ones. After grouping the works in the field, a literary historian must choose a major form in which to present results. I have argued that literary histories have two major forms, encyclopedic and narrative. I also have called attention to conceptual literary history as a subdivision of narrative. In this type, the historical field is integrated on the basis of a concept (or system of concepts) that the works are said to illustrate. Many such literary histories trace the fortunes of a concept, its changing character, or its recep tion over time. We turn now from the problems of organizing history to those of explaining it. An explanation tells why and how texts acquire the characteristics they have, and why they vary from previous texts in the specific ways they do. Reason might suggest that a good literary style would con tinue forever. Since history belies reason, and styles change, we try to account for the fact. Organizing literary history and explaining it are of course intimately related. A narrative reports, for exam121
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pIe, that the novel became less popular because film was invented. A happened, causing B, which led to C. Some theorists hold that a narrative can be an adequate expla nation of the events it includes. In encyclopedic literary histories, explanations are necessarily incomplete, dis persed, and ad hoc. In the past, encyclopedic form was a lazy convenience. But in contemporary literary histories, the form may be adopted precisely because the historian feels that no total explanation is possible. At the present time, virtually all explanations in liter ary histories are contextual. In other words, the historian places the text or textual feature that is to be explained in a set of other texts or circumstances that are said to have caused it or that help account for it. The context may be used to explain not only features of the text, but also its qualitative merit. Already in antiquity, the worth of the literature of Athens in the fifth century was explained by the free, democratic institutions of that city. The differ ence between explanations depends partly on what area of context is foregrounded -literature as an institution, other discourses, sociological structures, the economic order, political history. And it also depends on the mode of relationship - organic, oppositional, and so on -that is assumed to exist between the context and the text. The terms context and text are problematic. We expe rience the text as a nexus of meanings, and which ones are in the text and which derive from the context cannot be strictly determined. In any act of interpretation, the borders between the textual and the contextual are drawn by convention. Nevertheless, no one denies that texts are interpreted in contexts. Despite the difficulties, the terms refer to different moments in the processes of inter preting and accounting for literary works. The examples of contextual literary history chosen for comment are, in chronological order, Robert Wood's Essay on the Original Genius of Homer ( 1 769); Wilhelm Dilthey's 1865 essay on Novalis in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtungj Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Mad-
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woman in the Attic (1979); Stephen Greenblatt's Shake spearean Negotiations (1988); and Alan Liu's Words worth: The Sense of History (1989). That this group seems unrelated is of course intentional. The aim is to represent quite different varieties of contextual literary history, yet to show that the limitations and aporias inher ent in the method are evident in all. Any set of examples would substantiate essentially the same points. Robert Wood is cited as one of the first persons to apply in a systematic way what is still the most common and, intuitively, the most probable type of contextual explanation, namely, that a literary work directly reflects the world its author lives in. More than any other single thinker, Dilthey provides the intellectual foundations for literary history as it was generally written from the later nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and, in particular, for Geistesgeschichte. His essays in Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung are his most important practical attempts in the genre. The final three books exemplify literary history in the United States in its present moment of crisis. Feminist literary history has altered our picture of the past more than any other type of literary history in my lifetime, and I cite the work of Gilbert and Gubar as a well-known example. Its assumptions are essentially those of Wood-that a literary text expresses its author's mind and feelings and that these are formed and shaped by personal experiences. Gilbert and Gubar argue that the experience of living in a patriarchal society deter mines women's feelings in important ways and that these feelings are shared by all women writers. Among works by younger scholars, Liu's book offers an exceptionally prob ing and sophisticated attempt to relate the genesis of liter ary texts to social circumstances and political history. In his opinion, literature does not directly express or reflect these factors but does so in an ideologically deflected way. As well as any single book could, Greenblatt's illustrates the peculiarities of Renaissance New Historicism. Among
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our literary historians at present, moreover, Greenblatt offers an especially plausible, though vague, vision of the social processes by which literature is engendered- the contextual processes that explain texts. Certain axioms are fundamental to contextualizing ex planation as a method. l That context shapes texts is an assumption that empowers the method and cannot itself be proved. In a typical example, Jochen Schulte-Sasse dis cusses the hesitations of Weislingen, in Goethe's Gotz von Berlichingen, between "the old, feudal independence and the court life. To explain his hesitation by his character will not in the least do justice to his semantic function. He is the symbol of historical change, a figure of transition."2 If we ask why psychological analysis cannot ade quately account for Weislingen's hesitations, there is no answer except that historical contextualism prefers its own mode of explanation. It prompts research into the context and shows the possible relevance of the context in the particular case. It cannot demonstrate the irrele vance of alternative, noncontextual considerations to explain the same features of a text. Moreover, since con textual explanations pertain only to particular texts, no amount of them can justify a conclusion that context is always determining. I For discussion of contextualizing explanation in the writing of his tory, see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, pbk., 1975) 17 -21; in intellectual history, see Dominick LaCapra, "Rethinking Intel lectual History and Reading Texts," in Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven 1. Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982) 47-86, reprinted in Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983) 23-71; and in intellectual life gen erally, see White's source in Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (Berkeley: U of California P, 1942) 232-79. 2 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, "Drama," in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Tahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 3, Deutsche Aufkli:irung bis zur Franzosischen Revolution 1680-1 789, ed. Rolf Grimminger (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1980) 479.
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Another axiom is that the context of any text is unsearchably extensive and can never be fully described or known. The threads from the text into the context extend on all sides and lead, in Hayden White's metaphor, into "different areas of context" (18), stretching always further than they can be traced. In principle, contextual explanation cannot confine itself to only one or a few areas of context, though invariably this happens in prac tice. "There are," says Stephen Pepper, "many equally revealing ways of analyzing an event, depending simply on what strands you follow from the event into the con text. At each stage of your analysis . . . this choice of what strand to follow comes up again, and every strand is more or less relevant" (250). We decide which strands to follow on some basis, obviously, but whatever basis it may be, it will not be the principle of contextual explana tion, for this would lead us to follow all strands.3 This point was clear from the start of literary history, and is well stated by Dilthey: "Here, however, the true way in which we handle the historical conditions is to be emphasized. We leave the greater part of them entirely out of account, and without further consideration treat a limited set, that we select from them, as the totality. If, then, we claim to represent the historical conditions in our analysis, our claim, already on this ground, can only be approximately correct. We explain only by the most obvious conditions."4 A basic problem of contextual explanation is to main tain a ground for both the similarity and the difference between literary works. Sophisticated literary historians are keenly aware of the problem and have developed vari3 Max Weber, '''Objectivity' in Social Science and Social Policy," The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949) 78-84, discusses some of the gen· eral considerations that may lead us to foreground one aspect of context rather than another. 4 Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 12th ed. (Gottin gen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1921) 171.
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ous expedients, but essentially the problem is insoluble. There must be similarities between works to justify grouping them together (in genres, periods, traditions, movements, discursive practices, and so on), for without classification and generalization, the field cannot be grasped mentally. A great many, perfectly heterogeneous objects cannot be understood. Neither can they be repre sented within the amount of pages available to even the amplest of literary histories. On the other hand, we must obviously preserve the differences between works if only because these correspond to our sense of truth. If we start with the context, we cannot explain how it could determine works to be different. This considera tion makes difficulties for classic Marxist explanations and also, as we shall see, for the explanation of qualita tive differences between texts.5 In other words, if works have the same context, yet are unlike, their dissimilari ties cannot be explained contextually. Some other explan atory principle must be allowed. This happens all the time in literary histories (usually the other principle is the genius, temperament, or innate psychology of the writer), but such methodological compromise or unrigor ous eclecticism brings the discipline into intellectual dis honor. Purists also hold that a literary history should explain by only one area of context -by sociological fac tors, for example, or by Geistesgeschichte - and should not foreground now one area of context and now another. On the other hand, if we start with the differences between texts, we must, as contextualizers, look for dis5 H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982) 12, comments on this dilemma of classic Marxist explanations: "Since the number of ascertain· able determinants in the 'infrastructure' remained incomparably smaller than the more rapidly changing literary production of the 'superstruc ture,' the concrete multiplicity of works and genres had to be traced back to always the same factors or conceptual hypotheses, such as feudalism, the rise of the bourgeois society, the cutting-back of the nobility's func tion, and early, high, or late capitalist modes of production."
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similarities in their contexts that would explain these di vergencies. Thus we construct a different context for each text. Of course, both texts and contexts can in fact be both similar and dissimilar at the same time, resem bling each other in some respects and not in others. But in the writing of literary history, fashion swings over time from one pole to the other, and literary historians currently emphasize the diversity of contexts - locale, class, profession, institution, and so on -that were present in the tract of time they analyze. Whatever the object of historical inquiry, it is ana lyzed into heterogeneous objects, conflicting instances. This procedure is often advocated and practiced in a self righteous, self-congratulatory mood, as though it were an anti-ideological, antiestablishment gesture. We should keep in mind that what this historiography dissolves is not merely traditional and suspect images of the past (E. M. W. Tillyard's description of The Elizabethan World Picture has often been cited as an example) but the possi bility of forming any picture of the past at all, of holding it in mind, of understanding it. I should like to comment on certain consequences of these dilemmas. A literary history loses focus on texts if it tries to exhibit much of their context. This causes acute practical difficulties in the writing of literary histo ries. On the one hand, literature must not be engulfed and lost from view in representations of the total histori cal process of which literature is a part.6 On the other hand, the social and historical context must not be rele gated to an introduction or to separate chapters or parts of the book. For, in this case, the context inevitably becomes background, that is, a nexus of data loosely related to the texts themselves, the reader being required to do most of the relating. 6 Rolf Grimminger, "Vorbemerkung," in Hansers Sozialgeschichte 8-9; Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942) 264.
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It is, in fact, difficult for a literary history to represent the contextual realities as a sophisticated literary histo rian conceives them. How can an essay or book ade quately display the intricate, manifold involvement of a particular text in the hugely diverse context that is thought to determine it? Moreover, any context we use for interpretation or explanation must itself be interpreted. ? In other words, the context must be put in a wider con text, which itself must be interpreted contextually, and so on in a recession that can only be halted arbitrarily.8 For practical reasons, therefore, each book or article describes only a small piece of the context. But then a convincing argument must be given for privileging the bit of context we choose, a step often omitted. The proce dure is necessarily reductive.9 As we juxtapose our selected bit of context with the text, the wide spectrum of possible explanations dwindles to whatever our piece of context can support. Yet we try to make the piece of context support as much as possible and so fall into strained ingenuity and implausibility. The same logic imposes itself, of course, when we make contextual inter pretations of texts. Historical contextualism tends to sup press critical intelligence. Qualitative differences between texts raise these issues with special force. That historical contextualism, 7 Compare Jane P. Tomkins, "Graff Against Himself," Modern Lan guage Notes 96 (Dec. 1981): 1095: "If it is true that historical description . . . or any set of agreed upon historical facts are themselves the product of interpretation, how can we call upon history . . . to provide a ground against which the figure of the text may stand in relief?" 8 Compare Uwe Japp, Beziehungssinn: Ein Konzept der Literaturge schichte (Frankfurt a. M.: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1980) 68: "If every signification can be understood only under the condition that one under stands it within its contextual frame, this would in turn require that one draw in the next higher contextual frame. This would be no infinite regression, but a finite one, because every explication of a significance must finally reach the widest possible context." 9 Jean E. Howard, "The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies," English Literary Renaissance 16 (Winter 1986): 24, 31, 41.
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the reference to political, economic, sociological, cul tural, and literary circumstances, has no power to explain or even to describe the greater value of Othello than of Dekker's The Honest Whore or of Keats's volume of 1820 than of John Hamilton Reynolds's of 1821 is, to say the least, a serious deficiency. Historical contextualism may suggest conditions that enabled the achievement of Shakespeare or Keats and determined the forms and con tents of their works, but it cannot explain the achieve ment itself, the worth. Unless it asserts that they were produced in different contexts, it can find no cause why one work is better than another. Yet the quality or value of a work is usually the reason for seeking to contextual ize it. As they emphasize some authors or texts rather than others, literary historians depend on qualitative judg ments, but their methods provide no criteria for making such judgments. To discuss how canons are made would be a digres sion, but I may at least notice the opinion that they are always primarily ideological. For if this were the whole or even the main story, historical contextualism might indeed explain why Shakespeare and Keats occupy more space in literary histories than Dekker or Reynolds. The historian would show that in the ideological struggles of the years when Keats became canonical, his poems served politically dominant interests or, so far as was possible, were interpretively appropriated to do so. This argument gets the cart before the horse. Authors who have become canonical are ideologically appropriated, and this appro priation is one reason why they continue to be canonical. "Even the dead," as Benjamin says, "are not safe from the enemy when he conquers./II O But they are appropriated because they are becoming canonical, and in the rise to canonicity, ideology is not decisive. It may hinder accep10 Walter Benjamin, " U ber den Begriff der Geschichte," Gesam· melte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhiiuser (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1974) 1 :695.
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tance, as with Ezra Pound, but does not of itself cause it. The poems of Reynolds and Keats do not differ in their ideological availability. If Keats is appropriated and Reynolds forgotten, the difference must lie in qualities of Keats's poetry other than its ideological appeal. These, then, are the decisive factors in the processes by which his reputation was formed. To assert that our enthusi asms and ennuis in reading are determined mainly by ide ology is belied by the common experience of being moved and delighted by texts that are ideologically poi sonous to us. The most detailed study of canon formation known to me is Peter Uwe Hohendahl's Building a National Liter ature: The Case of Germany, 1830-18 70. 1 1 As Hohendahl closely analyzes the impact of political commitments and ideologies on critical opinions and the building of the canon, he bears out my argument. For example, Goethe was ideologically appropriated by different groups, but he was already canonical in the first important his tory of German literature by Gervinus (1835-42) . Hohen dahl explains the ideological functions Gervinus made Goethe serve. He does not, and does not have to, explain why Gervinus cast Goethe, rather than some other writer, in the important role. We cannot describe a context and from it predict the characteristics of the texts it will determine. 12 We start with the text and then construct a context to explain it. Whatever context a literary historian presents, the same textual characteristics can always be accounted for by alternative contextual explanations. For example, the formal discontinuity and fragmentation in The Waste Land can be related to Eliot's reading of F. H. Bradley and II Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830-18 70, trans. R. B. Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). 12 R. S. Crane, Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971) 22, points out that at most the circum stances of the age only create the possibility of producing the texts.
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Freud, to film technique, to the impact of modern urban life on consciousness, to Eliot's class position, and so on. If the different contexts cannot be synthesized, as usually they can, we may not know which to prefer. Moreover, historical context almost invariably means, in practice, the world that was contemporary with the text when it was produced. Since writers also derive impulses from works of former ages, this contextualizing practice is sim pleminded. 13 This difficulty can easily be avoided, but usually it is ignored, and intertextuality and history become rival ways of explaining texts. Contextual explanation depends on a certain model of historical process. Between the context and the event it explains, a continuity or causal connection must be pos ited. Yet postmodern literary histories are generally com mitted to models of the real that posit discontinuity between events. They use contextual studies to dissolve historical generalizations. As they expose the weltering diversities and oppositions in the field of objects they con sider, the continuities of traditional literary history van ish like ghosts at dawn. Thus context is deployed not to explain literary history but to deconstruct the possibility of explaining it. Yet the same historians also maintain that context is always only a construction of the literary historian, including, presumably, the context by which they deconstruct the context. Two unresolved problems are mediation, to use the Marxist term, and the mode of relation between context and text. Theories of mediation try to answer the ques13 Rene Wellek, "The Fall of Literary History," The A ttack on Litera· ture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982) 75-76. Alastair Fowler makes this fact a point of disciplinary difference between history and literary history. See his "The Two Histories," in Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins (Cambridge: Harvard Up, 1991) 123: "Very remote events . . . have usually no present effects worth discussing . . . . We can be fairly sure that a famine in ancient Sumeria has no immediate bearing on modern life." In literature, however, "literary classics may have direct effects after many centuries."
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tion: how-by what paths, processes, or chain of events does the context have its impact on the text?14 Logically, this question is unanswerable, since between each link in the mediating chain mediations must be specified. The paths can never be completely traced. In too many liter ary histories, moreover, the attempt to trace mediations is scarcely made. Instead, a literary fact is merely juxta posed with a fact of the social or political world, and the latter is asserted to be the cause of the former. The error here lies, as R. S. Crane puts it, in "the illicit assumption that we can deduce particularized actuality from general possibility" (53). The problem of mediation becomes increasingly im possible as either the context or the event to be explained becomes larger and more amorphous. To say, as Lukacs does, that the French Revolution and its attendant up heavals led to the creation of the historical novel as a form cannot be more than speculation.15 Since media tion can never be proved, literary historians content them selves with probabilities. Whatever else is involved, in hypothesizing the paths of mediation we almost always give prominence to the mind of the author, conscious or or unconscious. Here the contextual phenomena are reg istered and transferred, so to speak, to the work of art. 16 1 4 Compare Colin Martindale, Romantic Progressions: The Psychol ogy of Literary History (Washington, D. C.: Hemisphere, 1975) 9: "Although larger social changes may condition literary history, one can not claim to have explained their effects until he has specified the mech anisms whereby the effect is generated." 1 5 Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983) 23-26. 16 As Jan Mukafovsky points out: "Personality is the point where all the external influences that can affect literature intersect; it is at the same time the focal point from which they enter literary development. Everything that takes place in literature happens by the mediation of personality." From "The Individual and the Development of Art," as quoted in Juri; Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Rus sian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Harvard Up, 1989) 117.
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To ascribe such importance to the mind of the author is itself problematic; at the least, it is contrary to some theories of creativity. But the point I want to bring out is that, of itself, it makes mediation untraceable. We can observe what comes out of the minds of authors but not all that goes into them or goes on within them. How to conceive the posture of the text vis-a-vis its context is hotly debated. Whether the text directly re flects or expresses its context, symbolically expresses it, negates it, deflects it, or has some other relation to it, the context may still be said to determine the text, but in other respects these theories may be very different. Of course, one might suggest that texts have various rela tions with contexts, and most literary histories are eclec tic with respect to the kinds of context and the modes of relationship they deploy as explanations. But most theo rists of literary history have posited a particular mode of relationship as the normal one. A typology of contextual explanations might be based on the area of context and the mode of relationship they privilege. The areas of context usually cited are literary, cultural (Geist), or material, the latter being subdividable into the political, economic, and sociological. The modes in which texts can be related to these contexts are as simple mirrors or expressions, as symbolic, as organic parts of wholes, or as systematically differentiated. The latter cat egory comprises theories that show how texts vary from their contexts in ways that the context determines. Simple reflection or expression is, of course, the age old assumption of mankind: texts express what the writ ers observed or felt in their historical world. This theory is by no means obsolete. It is assumed, for example, by Jochen Schulte-Sasse in his commentary on Gotz von Ber lichingen and by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their analyses of the writings of women authors in the nine teenth century. The most prominent theorist of organic relations be tween text and context is Hegel, but his assumptions, in
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modified form, were widely shared. Dilthey, for example, did not accept the teleological and mystical ideas of Hegel but held that, because of complex, specific circum stances, an idea may have a historical moment of preva lence. The ideal of reason, for example, was promulgated from mind to mind in the Enlightenment. It modified lit erary texts, legal procedures, political theory, and so on, because these interacted on each other, none having pri ority. 17 This type of Geistesgeschichte, which posits the unity of an age in the dominance of an idea, also de scribes an organic or part/whole relation of a text to its context. Theories that emphasize the systematic difference of a text from its context include chiefly the various ones that conceive literature as an ideological reflection. We could also cite Fredric Jameson's theory, in The Political Unconscious, that art and literature express a formal and symbolic resolution of political and social contradic tions. l s In some theories, the relation of the text to its context is oppositional but not systematically so; that is, the respects in which the text diverges from its context are not determined by the context. In the complex dialec tic of Adorno, for example, texts reflect social realities even- or especially- in their forms and structures. But as art, they also criticize and oppose society, preserving the utopian moment of reconciliation, though only as art's illusion. In 1769, Robert Wood published his Essay on the Orig inal Genius of Homer. Wood had traveled in Asia Minor and observed with interest that the "manners" and mental ity he found there resembled the "representations of life" in the Iliad. He explains this by the continuity of physical and political structures that shaped existence in that part 17 Wilhelm Dilthey, Del Aufbau del geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970) 188-89, 218-19. 18 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Up, 1981) 79.
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of the world - soil, climate, and despotism. Because of this continuity, he argues, we can use life there at present to interpret the Iliad. For example, "let us not" suppose, with some of Homer's "best Commentators, that he considered the passion of love as a weakness unworthy of a Hero. . . . This passion, according to our ideas of it, was unknown in the manners of that age . . . the female sphere of action . . . was then confined to the uniformity of servile domestic duties . . . [and] ideas of love extended little further than animal enjoyment."19 The resemblances between manners as we see them in the Iliad and as we see them now proved that Homer's "constant original manner of composition" (20) was to depict the world immediately about him. This bolstered some other deductions. Because the Iliad so accurately rendered the landscape about Troy, Wood felt that Homer must have lived "in the neighborhood of Troy" (197). "His manner, not only of describing actions and characters, but of drawing portraits, looks very much, as if he had been either present [at the siege of Troy], or at least had taken his information from eye-witnesses" (219). By present lights, Wood's conclusions are entirely wrong. The manners described in the Iliad do not reflect any age exactly but a composite from different centuries. When what eventually became the Iliad was first written down, the poet or poets who dictated it were rendering a world they knew only from poems. Wood's brilliant essay can be cited as a permanent warning to historical contex tualizers. It reminds us not to forget the role of tradition, convention, and stylization in literary creation. When Jerome McGann tells us that "everything about" Tenny son's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is "time-and place specific," and that, therefore, we should read the poem in the context of contemporary newspaper reports of the charge at Balaklava, I do not deny this, but I add that we 19 Robert Wood, An Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1 769 and 1 775) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1976) 169.
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should also read it within the traditions and conventions of heroic war poems, going as far back as the Iliad. 20 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic equally assumes that texts express what their authors experienced, and I comment on this assumption later. But the work also illustrates another point of much importance. When used to interpret literature, context is itself an interpretation. The works focused on are by women in the nineteenth century. The context is, on the one hand, the social and cultural situation of women then -the opportunities that were open or closed to them, the ideals of behavior prescribed for them, and so on. But as is typical and necessary in literary histories, the book merely alludes to these social and cultural fac tors in passing. No serious attempt is made to investigate them. The authors may have assumed that the facts are well known; they did not wish, in any case, to submerge their literary commentary in sociological data and argu ment. On the other hand, the context is the literature women read, which was predominantly by males but in cluded a tradition of writings by women. This context consists, in the main, of Milton, of romantic poetry and gothic fiction, and of women writers. Additionally, Gil bert and Gubar exhibit images of women and attitudes to women writers that were, as they argue, generally present in literary tradition. In other words, the context is con structed very selectively. There is little reference to Shakespeare and to male novelists and essayists who were also contextually important. The major effort of the book, so far as it is not mere commentary, is to infer the psychic reactions of women writers from the social and literary context. We must ask, then, how Gilbert and Gubar can ascertain what took place in the minds of women; what thoughts, emotions, processes, and defense mechanisms were activated with20 Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985) 202.
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in them? Gilbert and Gubar rely on what seems logically probable to them and in doing so, they project their own feelings onto past writers. They claim, for example, that Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson yearned for a lost mother country or sunken Atlantis of female com munity, a land where women authors were at home.21 On the evidence cited, this claim is unconvincing. What strikes one, in this literary history, is that history seems to have entailed so little change. Gilbert and Gubar assume that the social and psychic dilemmas of women writers did not alter essentially throughout the nineteenth century and have not since. Hence, they freely quote contemporaries, such as Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich, to illuminate the states of mind of nineteenth-century women writers. In this respect, The Madwoman in the Attic is typical of feminist literary his tory and also of histories of literature by blacks, gays, and other minorities. Such histories promote feelings of iden tity and solidarity within the group by emphasizing con tinuities with the situation of members of the group in the past. As they explore the psychological binds of women writers in a patriarchal society, Gilbert and Gubar also take guidance from the theories of Harold Bloom. The agonistic relations Bloom describes between writers be come, in The Madwoman in the Attic, the desperation and swerves of women writers confronting male ones their psychic strategies for coping with the anxiety of influence. The assumption that literature articulates, directly or obliquely, the personal feelings and circumstances of the writer is not, to say the least, self-evident. As it is applied by Gilbert and Gubar, it seriously underestimates, in my opinion, the functioning of models, conventions, generic 21 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth·Century Literary Imagi· nation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 99-101.
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repertoires, intertextuality, codes, the necessity of defa miliarization, and other formal considerations that deter mine literary works. Here I am only repeating the criticism I made of Wood and McGann. But the point I want to bring out is that the assumption is necessary to much feminist literary history. In fact, it is one of those assumptions that enables a discipline. If the interest of the literary historian is in the distinctive situation, emo tions, and imagination of women, as evidenced by women writers, the texts must express what the histo rian seeks to know. Otherwise, why study them? The Madwoman in the Attic reveals something that is generally true, mutatis mutandis, of all contextual lit erary histories. The contextualizing is, in a sense, bogus. The ideas by which the literary works are explained and interpreted are not derived from the contexts or the texts so much as they are imposed upon them. They are formed from other sources, in other experiences (for example, the experience of reading Harold Bloom) , and applied to construct the contexts and read the texts. The ideas that Gilbert and Gubar apply in performing these constructions concern the psychic responses of women writers to social circumstances. This set of assumptions constitutes the critical machine that is created prior to reading the texts and is then driven over the texts and the contexts too. A certain insensitivity or ruthlessness in the commen taries of Gilbert and Gubar makes this point especially visible. For example, both formal and ideological consid erations lead Gilbert and Gubar to find madwomen among the characters in narratives by women. The formal necessity is visible in the title, which makes the madwoman a leitmotif of the book. Ideologically, there must be madwomen because this figure is "the author's double, an image of her own anxiety and rage" in a patri archal society (78). It is assumed that all nineteenth century women writers harbored these emotions. Conse quently, a madwoman must be produced in the last chap-
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ter, on Emily Dickinson, and that she did not write narratives is no obstacle. Dickinson lived her life as "a kind of novel or narrative poem in which . . . [she] enacted and eventually resolved both her anxieties about her art and her anger at female subordination." In short, " Emily Dickinson herself became a madwoman" (583). This inter pretation is not suggested by Dickinson's texts or by threads into their context, and yet The Madwoman in the Attic certainly intends to be contextual literary history. Wilhelm Dilthey's 1865 essay on Novalis premises that writers come into the world with individual endow ments - a temperament, psychological character, set of gifts -but if writers were only different from each other and not also like each other, it would be impossible to write a literary history. Members of the same generation encounter similar external conditions, Dilthey argues, and since these conditions partly determine their writ ings, resemblances arise, grounding the generalizations of literary history.22 External conditions, the world in which Novalis grew up, are, then, the context of his writings. They do not determine his writings completely, but negatively they close the horizon of what was possible for him. "The con ditions contain within definite limits the variability of that which is formed."23 In a very significant step, Dil they divides "the conditions that affect the intellectual 22 Rudolf Unger, Literaturgeschichte als ProbIemgeschichte (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft rur Politik und Geschichte, 1924) 7, says that Dilthey brought the idea of generations into Geistesgeschichte, tak· ing the idea from his teacher, Ranke. 23 Dilthey 171. Compare Fredric Jameson 148: "In the generic model outlined here, the relationship of the . . . historical situation to the text is not construed as causal . . . but rather as one of a limiting situation; the historical moment is here understood to block off or shut down a certain number of formal possibilities available before, and to open up determinate new ones. . . . Thus the combinatoire aims not at enumer ating the 'causes' of a given text or form, but rather at mapping out its objective, a priori conditions of possibility, which is quite a different matter."
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culture of a generation . . . into two factors." On the one hand, there is the "wealth of intellectual culture, as it is present at the time." On the other hand, there are the con ditions of "surrounding life," the "social, political, and other circumstances of infinitely many kinds" ( 1 71). The latter limit the developments possible out of the former. Thus, among the determinants of literary works, Dil they gives special importance to cultural discourses. He does not provide an argument to show that culture or Geist is a primary component of the context. He just assumes it and embodies his assumption in the classifica tion of contextual factors that presents Geist as half of the whole. In connection with Novalis, he stresses the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, the writings of Goethe and Schiller, the ferment in the natural sciences, and the ideas and books of Novalis's contemporaries and friends - Schleiermacher, Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. His essay, which is partly biographical, tells exactly how and when Novalis came into contact with these influences; and he is sometimes very particular, as when he devotes six pages to the impact of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister on Novalis's Hein rich von Ofterdingen. On the subject of the material, social, and political con ditions, however, Dilthey offers only a brief speculation. Germany, he argues, lacked a capital city, and in its small, moderately prosperous towns, the discoveries of the natu ral sciences had little effect on industry and trade. For sim ilar reasons, the revolution in philosophy caused no changes in political, religious, or educational institutions. These conditions were deleterious for Novalis and other intellectuals of his generation. Since their ideas found no practical resonance, they did not sufficiently refer them to reality. With all their intellectual and formal brilliance, their works consequently suffered from overidealization, incompleteness, and unrootedness. They are a "shattering example" of the way "historical conditions keep nobly sig nificant powers encircled as if with iron arms" (184).
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The concept of a generation has often been used by lit erary historians, but the logic of it is demolished by Wel lek, and it also invites postmodern deconstruction.24 The most serious objection to Dilthey is, of course, that he overestimates the importance of Geist as a factor in the explanation of literary history. His position is opposite to that of Marx, and the one can be used to undermine the other. What for Dilthey is primary is for Marx secondary or superstructural; the material realities that for Marx are primary are for Dilthey a set of limiting conditions among other, equally limiting sets of conditions. All of these conditions restrict what can be in consciousness at a given time and thus they ground the possibility of liter ary history, but as negations, they still leave much open. If we were to ask Dilthey what determines works posi tively to become what they are, he would point to the potentialities for further development that are given in the existing stock of culture, but he would also note the innate gifts and differences of writers. In other words, he does not believe that texts are wholly determined by con texts, and he does not believe that the literary series can be completely explained. By the middle of our century, most of the large, stan dard literary histories in England and the United States were more or less of Dilthey's kind. I do not mean that their authors had read Dilthey, for usually they had not. But they practiced a kind of historiography for which Dil they is the most important theorist. The Anglo-Saxon lit erary historians of the 1 940s and 1950s did not resemble Dilthey in giving central importance to biography, and they did not assert that periods are intellectually or spirit24 See, for example, Friedrich Kummer, Deutsche Literaturge· schichte des 1 9. Jahrhunderts dargestellt nach Generationen (Dresden: C. Reissner, 1908)i Julius Petersen, "Die literarischen Generationen," in Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Emil Ermatinger (Berlin: Junker and Diinnhaupt, 1930)i Edward Wechssler, Die Generation als Jugendreihe und ihr Kampf urn die Denkform (Leipzig: Quelle and Meyer, 1930). For Wellek's demolition see Theory of Literature 279-80.
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ually unified. But like Dilthey they took the mind or thought of an age, as expressed in its philosophy, religion, science, law, educational theory, art, and literature, as their main explanatory context, and in contrast to many literary histories written in the Victorian period and in the present,25 they granted the realm of mind or thought a large measure of autonomy. They doubted that changes in literature could usually be correlated with social, eco nomic, and political developments and rarely attempted to make such connections. Much less did these literary historians suppose that literary and other discourses serve ideological functions in a struggle for social power. Two of the finer literary histories of the period can be cited as examples: the volumes in the Oxford History of English Literature by Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660 ( 1945), and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954). They are quite different from works analyzed elsewhere in this chapter by present-day literary historians - Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Alan Liu, and Stephen Greenblatt. Dilthey secured the unity of a period, which he grounded in a characteristic mentality, by emphasizing the newer developments in the intellectual life of a time and place. Only these were visible in his portraits of peri ods. Bush and Lewis, however, had a vision, which they did not articulate theoretically, that was more compar able to the structuralist vision of Braudel. For them the past lingered massively. Most of what was present in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries was the past, that which had also been present in the Middle Ages. In Bush and Lewis, this vision of historical reality was, in part, the natural product of a survey approach. If 25 For a brief survey of Victorian literary histories, see Rene Wellek, "English Literary Historiography during the Nineteenth Century," in Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970) 143-63.
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we inventory what is thought at any given time, we will always find that most of it was also thought in earlier times. Also, both Bush and Lewis were reacting against previous descriptions of the Renaissance that too sharply demarcated and described it as an emancipation from the medieval. Their understanding of the slowness of general intellectual change and of the consequent diversity and strife of outlooks within their periods seemed in their time more sophisticated, learned, and balanced than the view it contested. What, in general, typifies the authors Bush and Lewis describe is the conflict within them of medieval and modern ways of thinking. Thus, as com pared with Dilthey, both Bush and Lewis tend to dissolve the unity of their periods. As a result, Bush and Lewis contextualize only in an ad hoc way. Though Hegel explained the Geist, spirit, or unified mentality of an age by metaphysics, and Dilthey explained it by wholly natural causes, both these authors could cite the Geist of a period as the context for each of its manifestations. Lacking such a unified context, Bush and Lewis could only connect whatever features of texts they happened to be interested in with whatever bits of context seemed relevant. Theirs are literary histories in the age of criticism the age of the massive influence of T. S. Eliot and the New Criticism. Both Bush and Lewis give an enormous amount of contextual information and explanation. They perceive literary works as part of a style, cluster, school, or tradition; or they explain them by some strand of reli gious, political, or other opinion in their time. Bush, moreover, defended a historical, contextual approach to literature in a controversy with Cleanth Brooks that was well known in the 1950s. Nevertheless, in writing about individual authors, both Bush and Lewis extend the genre of literary history by including more criticism than had hitherto been customary. Criticism is, of course, a term of uncertain meaning, but in this context it means an analytic, evaluative discourse that does not refer to his-
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tory. Because Bush and Lewis conceived context as Geist, did not conceive Geist as unified, and gave much space to criticism, their literary histories are less contextual than many written before and since. In Wordsworth: The Sense of History (1989), Alan Liu explains literary texts by political and social realities, but his conceptions are more complicated than those we have encountered hitherto.26 A couple of examples may enable us to test Liu's long, detailed, intricate argument. Wordsworth was in France on the Fete of Federation, 14 July 1790, and witnessed, as he traveled through France with his friend Robert Jones, the enthusiasm of that moment. It is possible, says Liu, to recapture approxi mately the "French view" of Federation Day and to com pare this with Wordsworth's view, as expressed in his autobiographical The Prelude.27 Doing this, Liu finds that Wordsworth aestheticized what he saw. He viewed the political festivities in France as a spectacle, and his verse rendered them in the conventions of georgic poetry. In another, more famous passage of The Prelude, writ ten in 1804, Wordsworth celebrates the imagination ris ing in "strength/ Of usurpation" from the "mind's abyss" (bk. 6, lines 592-616). For several previous years, Liu observes, " 'usurper' was applied to Bonaparte in English parliamentary speeches, pamphlets, and newspapers with the consistency of a technical term" (27). Other features of the passage in book 6 also recall Napoleon. For exam ple, the lines come as Wordsworth narrates his walking tour in the Alps where Napoleon had campaigned. "A Swiss mountain pass in 1804 was first and foremost a mil itary site" (27). It is important to notice the concept of mediation 26 Alan L iu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989). 27 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959) bk. 6, lines 342-408; see Liu 15.
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underlying the second example. Liu does not go directly from the historical events concerning Napoleon to Words worth's poem but from the events to their representations in popular discourses; he assumes that these associated Napoleon and usurpation in Wordsworth's mind and are the context of the passage in book 6. In both these examples, Liu argues, Wordsworth's poetry can be said to "deny history." In the one case, the Rev olution is treated as happy pastoral, in the other, the imag ination displaces Napoleon. The imagination treads the stage of Wordsworth's poem as a usurping "power," a type of Napoleon, but also as a criticism of Napoleon, since its usurpation is benign and reveals ultimate truth. "Words worth's stress in 1804 that the Imagination is its own reward, and so eschews spoils and trophies, should be seen to reject precisely Napoleon's famed spoliations" (29). Both passages in The Prelude illustrate the pervasive Words worthean theme, easily criticized as ideological, by which revolution and utopia take place, not in the political world, but in the psychic and moral life of the individual. But, says Liu, though history is denied in Wordsworth's poetry, his texts refer to what is being denied. The paean to imagination mentions trophies and spoils. Moreover, on principles derived from structuralist thought, we can assume that what is denied is always present. A culture produces "reality" by laying over the amorphousness of experience a grid of concepts, thus converting "reality" into a structured field, and the whole field is implicit in any moment of it. Through historical research, we can re construct the different interpretive positions and emo tional attitudes that could be held in a certain time toward a specific event. If Wordsworth adopts position x, positions y and z, which he does not adopt, are also present to his mind and thus are being denied in an act of conscious or unconscious will. Thus we can say not only that Wordsworth took an aesthetic view of Federation Day but also that at some level of his being he chose not
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to adopt the French view, and we can further speculate that his wish to deny this view was the impelling motive toward the aesthetic view. This method of contextual interpretation and explana tion Liu calls a "denied positivism able to discriminate absence" (24) . That "literary texts emerge . . . precisely through a critical or second-order negation: the arbitrary but nevertheless determined differentiation by which they do not articulate historical contexts" (46) is, for Liu, a universal principle of literary creation. Thus Liu agrees with Wood and with Gilbert and Gubar in explaining texts by their matrix in material life, but where these assume a direct reflection, Liu perceives a deflective or oppositional relation of text to context. Liu's argument is vulnerable to all the objections that bear on historical contextualism in general. He con structs a context and asserts that this context shaped the texts he discusses. He tries to support his assumption by circular demonstrations. Only two areas of context are foregrounded: the political and sociological, and the choice of these is again a premise or an act of faith. The method wrongly presumes that, in Wallace Stevens's phrase, a poem is "the cry of its occasion." It brings no insight into the qualitative aspects of literature. Since there can be no objective criterion of relevance, the con text can be elaborated at great length, and the insight thus obtained may not be worth the effort. Liu, for exam ple, goes for thirty pages into sociological information and analysis, with much original research pertaining to family structure and ideology in the Lake District, in order to interpret one scene in The Borderers (236-66). The principle of contextual explanation is used in a self contradictory way, being applied to Wordsworth's texts but not to the texts by which Wordsworth is interpreted. The difference between Liu and other literary histo rians is that he sees most of these objections. He natur ally does not admit, in so many words, that by his selec tion and interpretation of data he constructs the context,
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rather than objectively discovering it, but his book has a remarkable epilogue, and in it a voice asks Liu whether "what you mean by history is distinguishable from what your poet meant by imagination?" (501). To this question neither Liu nor anyone has a satisfactory answer. We can not deny that contexts are constructed by literary histo rians; we cannot concede that all constructions are equally valid; and we cannot completely agree on criteria as to which to prefer. In relating texts to historical con texts, Liu tries to achieve credibility by circularity. We may consider, for example, his argument that "in the con text of the years immediately preceding 1804, 'usurper' cannot refer to anyone other than Napoleon" (26). Read ing popular discourses of the time, Liu has found that Napoleon was frequently called a usurper. But he carried out this research because he guessed that usurpation meant Napoleon; he even wanted it to do so, and his research confirmed his wish. He has not tested other hypotheses; in other words, he has not tried to explain Wordsworth's metaphor of usurpation through different contexts. Generalizing, we may say that, since as contex tual interpreters we cannot explore more than a small area of context, we can never be sure that it is the most relevant area. Liu's argument violates its contextualist premises. In this type of historical explanation, any strand of context may become an event to be contextualized and logically must become this if the explanation is carried out in further detail. To explain fully why a metaphor of usurpa tion in Wordsworth's poetry may be interpreted as an allu sion to Napoleon, one would have to contextualize the context of Wordsworth's expression. In other words, one would have to explain contextually why Pitt, Sheridan, Coleridge, and others referred to Napoleon as a usurper in political speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper articles. The distinction between event and context is not intrin sic, but conventional and practical, the event being the portion of the context that one foregrounds and tries to
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explain. We cannot, therefore, allow two different rules of interpretation, one for the contextualized events and one for the strands of context. Yet Liu does this. Literary texts deflect their context, he argues, but he takes for granted that other discourses, which are the contexts of litera ture, respond directly to their contexts. If Liu assumed that all texts, literary and otherwise, deflected their con texts, he would find it very much more difficult to estab lish a context. In Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations the arbitrary choice of context, inherent in all historical contextualizing, becomes obvious and extreme.28 In each essay Greenblatt picks out a particular discourse pro duced in Shakespeare's time, such as Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) or Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603) . These discourses, or some fea tures of them, are described at length, set in a context of other discourses on similar topics, and interpreted accord ing to ideas drawn from Foucault, from neo-Marxist thought, and from cultural anthropology. Each of Green blatt's essays brings one of these discourses, thus richly saturated, into relation with one or more of Shakespeare's plays. This procedure is very peculiar, or it would seem so had it not been so widely imitated. Every other contex tual interpreter I have cited assumes that the textual features he or she discusses were determined or partly determined by the context exhibited. Greenblatt makes no such assumption. The discourses he describes con tributed either little or nothing at all to the genesis of the plays. Greenblatt does not even attempt, usually, to trace a path of mediations between the other discourse and Shakespeare's play. To show that Shakespeare was aware 28 Alan Liu strongly emphasizes the arbitrary choice of context in Historicism in "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELH 56 [Winter 1989): 722.
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of the other discourse is not necessary to his argument. Moreover, Greenblatt did not himself need to read these other discourses in order to produce his interpretations of Shakespeare, and Greenblatt's readers would not need to be instructed about these other discourses in order to follow his interpretations. Thus the context is made intensely interesting and expressive in itself, but its rela tion to Shakespeare is ancillary. A harsh criticism might be that it was ornamental. I begin with the question of mediation. Robert Wood assumes that Homer saw what he describes. Dilthey shows that Novalis had read the works that determined his own. Alan Liu is careful to trace the paths from Napoleon's doings to representations of them in news papers and thence to Wordsworth's consciousness. Green blatt points out that Shakespeare had read Harsnett's work on exorcisms, but this is only incidental to his argu ment. Discourses, he says, are made from collectively pro duced materials -words, myths, customs. They are made within social institutions and are partly determined by the aims of the institution. Between discourses, or be tween the various institutions of Elizabethan society, there was a circulation, such that each one appropriated, reinterpreted, and applied to its own purposes materials from other "culturally demarcated zone[s]."29 Particular instances of exchange between cultural zones and dis courses may be called transactions or negotiations. Mediation takes place not at the individual level but at the cultural level, in the anthropological conception of culture. Yet Greenblatt does not posit an organic, totally unified culture about which one could write a master nar rative. His concepts of circulation and negotiation be tween cultural institutions are designed to secure a con tinuity between different discourses, making it fruitful to read them together and, yet, to also preserve their dif29 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Claren· don, 1988) 7.
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ferences and oppositions. Because of the circulation be tween cultural zones, any discourse can be brought into conjunction with any other, so long, that is, as the essay ist can construct an interrelation between them. But no one has yet written a New Historicist essay on discourses between which no connection could be found. By the usual circular logic, in other words, the result demon strates the usefulness of the method. But is it useful? If we view Greenblatt's essays as interpretations - and very interesting ones - of Shake speare's plays, we find that the contextualization, the exhibition of Harriot's discourse, or Harsnett's polemic, or Hugh Latimer's sermon, contributes very little to clar ify or support Greenblatt's readings of Shakespeare. Green blatt says that he uses Harriot's discourse on the land of Virginia as an "interpretive model" for understanding the far more complex "relation between orthodoxy and sub version" in Shakespeare's history plays (23). But if we ask by what model does Greenblatt interpret Harriot, the answer is by a set of ideas that he brings to Harriot, brings also to the history plays, and would anyway have brought to the plays whether he had read Harriot or not. Samuel Harsnett's polemic describes the exorcism of demons as a fraud. Such cases, Harsnett says, are really only theater, only illusion. Both the persons supposedly possessed by a demon and the officiating clergy are merely staging performances, and the credulous who be lieve that they witness the expulsion of a demon are gulled. Since both the Jesuits and the Puritan preachers conducted exorcisms, Harsnett promotes the Anglican church by denying the claim of its rivals to operate this spiritual power. When, in King Lear, Edgar acts the role of a demoniac, the play reiterates Harsnett's line. Mad Tom is not pos sessed by a demon but is only Edgar playing a role. But as King Lear takes this understanding from the Anglican church, it is "emptied out" ( 1 19). As Harsnett undermines exorcisms, he does not wish to deny the reality of super-
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natural eviL But in Lear, the fact that demonic posses sion is only feigned becomes one strand in a much larger web of implication. " In Shakespeare, the realization that demonic possession is theatrical imposture leads not to a clarification- the clear-eyed satisfaction of the man who refuses to be gulled -but to a deeper uncertainty, a loss of moorings, in the face of evil" ( 122) . The suggestion, which Greenblatt supports with several references to the text, is that Lear entertains the possibility of a world in which neither evil nor good has supernatural meaning, in which man's moral life has no transcendent dimension, and the evil presented in the play is merely naturaL Such is Greenblatt's argument, lamentably shorn in this synop sis of its richness, subtlety, and suggestiveness. My point is that Greenblatt's interpretation of Lear is based simply on his reading of the text; more exactly, with a wonderful critical pathos it projects his own be liefs into the text. What relation does it have to Harsnett? At most, Greenblatt could claim only that reading Hars nett contributed very slightly to the "uncertainty, a loss of moorings, in the face of evil" of King Lear, but even this interpretation of the impact of reading Harsnett de pends on Greenblatt's prior, more general interpretation of Lear. Greenblatt developed this interpretation for rea sons that had nothing to do with Harsnett. Perhaps this is only to say that Greenblatt's essay is not really a contextual explanation or interpretation of Lear. His essay combines two intentions that are logi cally separate: to interpret the play and to exemplify the processes of circulation and negotiation among cultural discourses and institutions. Harsnett is seriously rele vant only to the latter topic, for which he provides a bril liant illustration. I wish to make it clear that in discuss ing Greenblatt's and other literary histories, my object of criticism has not been these particular writers but the contextual method. The examples I have chosen are justly admired. Neither am I immune to the plausibility and fascination of contextual explanation at its best, and
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I am perfectly aware that other modes of explanation and
interpretation are equally vulnerable to fundamental cri tiques. Nevertheless, if one wishes to practice as, say, a New Historicist, the aporias of other schools of criticism should not console for one's own.
7 Theories of Immanent Change
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LITERATURE, SAYS BRUNETI E RE, HAS "IN ITSELF and from the first the sufficient principle of its develop ment."l This is the essential assumption of an immanent or internal explanation of the literary series. ''A poem," Harold Bloom maintains, is the "rewriting" of a previous poem; "one poem helps to form another."2 "The form of the work of art," Viktor Shklovsky argues, "is determined by its relation to other, already existing forms";3 and as the Russian Formalists elaborate this insight, the literary ser ies is conceived as changing by its own inherent dynamic. The system is not completely independent of happen ings that are external to literature, but the immanent fac tors are far more important. Bloom also concedes that "even the strongest poets are subject to influences not poetical" but nowhere talks about such influences.4 And I Ferdinand Brunetiere, Etudes critiques sur l'histoire de la littera ture franr;aise (Paris: Hachette, 1912) 3, quoted in Rene Wellek, A His tory of Modern Criticism 1 750-1950 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965) 4:65. 2 Harold Bloom, Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale UP, 1976) 3, and Poetics of Influence, ed. John Hollander (New Haven: Henry R. Schwab, 1988) 47. 3 Viktor Shklovsky, "The Connections between the Devices of Plot Construction and Stylistic Devices in General," in Texte der russischen Formalisten, vol. 1, Texte zur allgemeinen Literaturtheorie und zur Theorie der Prosa, ed. Jurij Striedter (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969) 51. 4 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Up, 1973) 1 1 .
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Brunetiere acknowledges that the point of view of Taine and his disciples, who interpret literature as a product of historical and sociological realities - of race, moment, and milieu, in Taine's triad - cannot be completely re jected: If I have not omitted to note those other influences on which it is the habit to lay weight, the influence of race or the influence of environment." But Brunetiere con tinues, in a passage Shklovsky quotes in 1916: "However, as I hold that of all the influences which make them selves felt in the history of a literature, the principle is that of works on works, I have made it my special con cern to trace this influence and to follow its continuous action." s Brunetiere perfectly understood the advantages of an immanent literary history. When we explain the literary series by external circumstances or events, our construc tion may be heterogeneous, miscellaneous, a bird's nest of straw, string, twigs, grass, and feathers -whatever we happened to find. We foreground now one bit of context, now another, and the second may have no relation to the first except that both contributed to the literary event. No context can be fully described, no explanation can seem complete. Both intellectually and aesthetically, such literary histories must be inelegant. An immanent literary history is still contextual; it puts an author or text in a supposedly determining con text of other authors or texts. But since it drastically lim its the area of context, it enables us to create relatively coherent literary histories, focused and interrelated narra tives. For example, without referring to medieval social structures, politics, or Geistesgeschichte, Brunetiere would trace how the Romans d'aventures (Amadis) evolved from the Chanson de geste (Roland) by a gradual differentiating of functions. The Chanson de geste is "almost history." But from it the genres of memoir and 5 Ferdinand Brunetiere, Manual of the History of French Literature, trans. Ralph Derechef (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898) vii.
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chronicle detached themselves, and "in the degree that it lightened itself of its historical substance, the heroic poem gave a more considerable part of itself to legend and dream; this is the epoch of the Tales of the Round Table," and led to such works as Amadis, in which "improbabil ity is the principal beauty. They are written to give lib erty to the imagination in full career."6 In order to earn its narrative coherence, a theory of immanent explanation must answer three questions. It must say why literature is determined more by imma nent than by external factors. It must explain the super ficially puzzling fact that works differ from the works that supposedly formed them. And it must account for the particular character or direction of the difference. There are a great many quasi-immanent explanations of literary change, and we may ignore most of them. They are no longer plausible. We may, for example, exclude all cyclical theories, such as Wilhelm Scherer's theory that German literature reaches a high point every six hundred years (600, 1200, 1800); W B. Yeats's wheel of culture through the twenty-eight phases of the moon; and North rop Frye's rotation of modes from myth to irony and over again.7 Excluded also are theories that interpret the liter ary series by analogies to natural life and death, the drear ily familiar figures of the birth, maturity, decline, and end of a form, genre, national literature, and so on. When they are intended as explanations, these flowers of rhet oric are inappropriate, for whatever else it may resemble, the literary series is not like a plant or animal. Behind this analogy lies, very often, the notion of a Geist as the subject going through the organic cycle -the Geist of trag edy, or the Geist of Russian literature. Probably a Geist 6 Ferdinand Brunetiere, r:Evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la liWlrature (Paris: Hachette, 1914) 5-6. 7 Wilhelm Scherer, Geschichte der Deutschen Litteratur, 10th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905) 18-22; W. B. Yeats, A Vision (New York: Mac millan, 1956) 67-184; Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism.' Four Essays (princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) 33-35, 42.
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I S LITERARY HISTORY PO SSIB LE ?
is what Friedrich Schlegel had in mind when he said that Greek culture was "completely original and national, a whole complete in itself, which through merely inner de velopment reached a highest point, and in a complete cir cle sank back again into itself."s The thought of Geist recalls Hegel and the many explanations, still put for ward today, of the history of a movement, genre, and so on, as the logical (dialectical) development of an idea. I have earlier expressed skepticism about such correla tions of the contingencies of history with logic. Theories that present the historical changes of litera ture as an oscillation between two poles also have little to recommend them.9 The idea that literature alternates between phases of convention and revolt was given prom inence by John Livingston Lowes, l O but occurs in many variant formulations. Such schemes are supposedly de rived from study of literary history, but are actually a pri ori conceptions based on analogies. Occasionally such antitheses have been modeled on Wolffiin's description as an art historian of two opposed modes of perception, the "Renaissance," or linear, and the "Baroque," or "paint erly," but even Wolffiin had great difficulty in applying his scheme to explain the history of art. For when he lined up paintings in a series, he saw transition rather than clearly demarcated, polar types, and his memorable confession deserves to be quoted again: "Everything is transition and it is hard to answer the man who regards history as an endless flow. For us, intellectual self-preser vation demands that we should classify the infinity of events with reference to a few results."l ! T. E. Hulme, 8 Friedrich Schlegel, " Dber das Studiurn der griechischen Poesie" (1795), in Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et a1. (Paderborn: F. Sch6ningh, 1979) 1:302. 9 On this subject see Elerner Hankiss, "The Structure of Literary Evolution," Poetics no. 5 ( 1972) . 10 John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919). I I Heinrich W6lfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of
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Fritz Strich, and Louis Cazamian may be cited among the many persons who have tried to base literary history on a typology of the romantic and the classical, literature swinging periodically from one pole to the other. We may also, in this context, pay no attention to the ories of the necessary progress or decline of literature. The notion that forms gradually and progressively ex haust their possibilities, and that this process determines their evolution, is untestable, since we can never specify in advance what the possibilities of a form may be, and we can never say, at any point in time, that they are played out.12 No theory could be more brilliantly and var iously expounded than was, in the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries, the idea that the arts and literature decline as civilization advances.13 But this theory of decline is invalidated, at least in my opinion, by the liter ature produced since. Neither is the literary series teleo logical. It is not, for example, impelled by a technical aim that continues through generations and is gradually achieved, like the effort for realistic illusion that, accord ing to E. H. Gombrich, governs the development of paint ing into the nineteenth century. 14 We observed that theorists of immanent literary change generally concede that external factors also play a role. Often it is difficult to know whether a theory should be considered immanent or not. The cyclical the ory of Scherer, for example, is an immanent one because it posits a regular, periodic recurrence of literary flower ings and witherings. On the other hand, it gives no rea son for this periodicity, which might be due to chance; Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950) 227. 12 Compare John Frow, Marxism and Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986) 1 10-1 1 . 1 3 Judith Plotz, Ideas of the Decline of Poetry: A Study in English Criticism from 1 700 to 1830 (New York: Garland, 1987). 14 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon, 1960).
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and Scherer's might even be a contextual explanation insofar as it correlates these flowerings with German openness to foreign influences and with ideal social atti tudes about women. A Geist is usually described as a totality in which literature is an organic part. The same principle that pervades the totality (e.g., Greek culture) works also in literature and produces its continual tran sition. Such organic theories of literary development are both immanent and contextual. The theory of Wolffiin is immanent because he argues that "the effect of picture on picture as a factor in style is much more important than what comes directly from the imitation of nature," and because two "forms of apperception" express themselves in alternation through out the history of painting. On the other hand, if we ask why the reversals occur when they do, why the painterly replaces the linear style (or vice versa) at a given mo ment, Wolffiin hesitates between immanent and external explanations. " Here we encounter the great problem - is the change in the forms of apprehension the result of an inward development . . . or is it an impulse from out side . . . which determines the change." Both answers are possible. Certainly we must not imagine that an internal mechanism runs automatically and produces, in any conditions, the said series of forms of apprehension . . . . But the human imagin ative faculty will always make its organization and possibil ities of development felt in the history of art. It is true, we only see what we look for, but we only look for what we can see. Doubtless certain forms of beholding pre-exist as possi bilities; whether and how they come to development de pends on outward circumstances.
(230)
On the whole, Wolffiin believes that the painterly style develops out of the linear by immanent principles, but that in the other reversal, the return from the painterly to the linear, the main impetus lies certainly in outward cir cumstances (230-33) .
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A major theory of decline in the eighteenth century attributed literature's dwindling imagination and passion to increasingly refined manners, civilized rationality, the growth of literary criticism, and the greater abstraction of language as it matures, that is, to causes external to lit erature itself; hence, this explanation might be consid ered contextual rather than immanent. But literature, according to this theory, has an essential role in creating the social conditions that cause its decline. Thus the rela tion of external and immanent causes may be dialectical. An external factor becomes internal if it enters literature and changes it. If an immanent transformation of litera ture has an effect in the social world, this effect becomes a factor external to literature and may have an impact on it, thus becoming internal again. i s The distinction of external and internal factors is not meaningless, but it can be made only with regard to a particular literary event at a moment in time. Only three immanent theories have any degree of plau sibility and practical impact on the writing of literary his tory at the present time. They are the theories of the Rus sian Formalists, of W. J. Bate about the remorselessly growing "burden of the past," and of Harold Bloom. I also note the theories of Brunetiere, for though he has now no influence and hardly any readers, he was the first to express the necessity and the possibility of immanent explanation of the type now current. In fact, he adum brated some of the central ideas of the Russian Formalists. Since Formalism was a dialogic critical movement, involving several thinkers and changing positions over thirteen years, and is extended in Czech Structuralism, it is misleading to speak of a single Formalist theory of lit erary history. Therefore, I will focus on magnificent 15 For discussion of this point, see M. M. Bakhtin/P. M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985) 26-30.
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essays by Yury Tynyanov on "The Literary Fact" and "Lit erary Evolution," though with some reference to earlier Formalist writings. First, however, I note the remarkable agreement in essential points of all these theories. None of these theorists spend much time arguing their primary assumption that immanent factors are the decisive ones. They hope, no doubt, to establish this con cretely, by showing the importance of immanent factors in particular cases and by uncovering the mechanisms by which they determine literary works. There are repeated claims that these immanent explanations are grounded, more than other explanations, in the actual psychology of writers, in their conscious and unconscious percep tions and intentions during the creative process. Thus these immanent theories are unhistorical, for they are based on something- the psychology of writers - that is assumed to be unchanging from age to age. All that changes, according to these theories, is the past itself, growing more oppressive as it accumulates, and therefore mobilizing psychological defenses more intensely. As Bloom puts it, the anxiety of influence "has increased as history proceeds"; it "is strongest where poetry is most lyrical, most subjective, and stemming directly from the personality."16 Poets and novelists have often testified that these theories express dilemmas they actually feel. Yet we shall see that the principle by which these theories explain the course of modern literature is said to operate in some writers, but not in all. This is not really a defect of the theories, for individ uality is a stumbling block in any theoretical explanation of literary history. Since the explanatory principle does not apply to all writers in the same way, a second princi ple is required to explain why certain writers were sub ject to the first principle and others were less so or not at all. Why, in Bloom's terms, are some but not all writers "strong" ? Or why, in the terms of the Russian Formalists, 16
Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 62.
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do some writers produce automatized works and others defamiliarized ones ? If individuality is unexplainable and makes a difference, no theory, either contextual or immanent, can completely explain literary history. The orists of literary history must allow for the effects of indi viduality in order to be plausible, but for the sake of a general explanation they must downplay the role of indi viduality as much as possible. They must assume that, as Keats put it, even "the mightiest Minds" are subdued "to the service of the time being."17 To the extent that writ ers are not thus subdued, literary histories can be no more than suites of biographies, which is what they often have been. These immanent theories all posit essentially the same principle of literary change: the desire or necessity of writers to produce works unlike those of previous writ ers. IS There is, as Brunetiere says, "nothing metaphysical" about it: "We wish to be different from those who have preceded us in history: this design is the origin and deter mining cause of changes of taste as of literary revolu tions."19 He does not say why we wish to be different, but innumerable reasons suggest themselves, ranging from the need of an artist to ·be noticed to dissatisfaction with a currently dominant style. H. P. H. Teesing quotes Spranger's Psychologie des Tugendalters on this point: "The ready and formed 17 John Keats to Reynolds, 3 May 1 8 18, The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958) 1:282.
IS Colin Martindale, Romantic Progression: The Psychology of Liter ary Change (Washington, D.c . : Hemisphere, 1975), develops a similar argument from the point of view of a sociologist. He describes the vicious circle of the autonomy of poetry. A work of art must be different from previous productions. As the autonomy of a poetic subculture increases, fewer social constraints limit the expression of originality. "The poet experiences a stronger pressure toward novelty and his audi ence exerts a lessened resistance to it . . . but these changes make poetry less palatable to the audience and thus lead to further incre ments in autonomy" ( 1 1, 51). 1 9 Brunetiere, Manual vii.
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(Ranke says: 'the life found before one') is . . . accepted as obvious . . . . The accent of life places itself on what one lacks, on the places that have remained empty in the inner and in the shared world."20 Or we might note that every style suppresses certain aspects of reality; while foregrounding others, and its limitations become appar ent over time. When the style seems a stylization only, it will be abandoned in a literary culture that values mime sis. In the Russian Formalist model, literature proceeds dialectically through moments of automatization and defamiliarization. The purpose of art, says Shklovsky, is "to increase the difficulty and length of perception,"2 1 to make perception fuller and more vivid. What the tech niques of art make perceptible are both the art itself and also the things represented within it. "The material of the work of art," Shklovsky says elsewhere, "is constantly played with the pedal, that is, it is rendered prominent, 'made to resound.'''22 Thus, when themes and techniques have become familiar, banal, and automatized, art no longer has its effect, and a different principle of construc tion must develop. The new principle of construction announces itself, is applied to the greatest possible num· ber of different phenomena, and in turn, Tynyanov explains, becomes "automatised and calls forth opposed principles of construction." "If there are epochs in which all poets write 'well,' then the 'bad' poet is the genius."23 In Bate's theory, past literature constitutes, for writers, a canon of the forbidden, of forms that can no longer be used because they have already been fully exploited. He 20 H. P. H. Teesing, Das Problem der Perioden in der Literaturge· schichte (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 19491 65-66. 21 Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Crit icism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 19651 12. 22 Shklovsky, "The Connections between the Devices of Plot Con struction" 5 l . 2 3 Yury Tynyanov, "The Literary Fact," in Texte der russischen Form· alisten 1:413, 403.
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quotes T. S. Eliot: "Not only every great poet, but every genuine, though lesser poet, fulfills once for all some pos sibility of the language, and so leaves one possibility less for his successors" ; and "When a great poet has lived, cer tain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again."24 As the past grows longer, it engenders in writers an intensifying crisis of self-confidence, a "deep ening of self-consciousness" (4), powerfully affecting what and how they write. Yet, our theorists concede that many writers do not wish to be different. There are the works in automatized styles of which the Formalists speak, the poets of generos ity of spirit, in Bloom's generous description of them, who are directly open to predecessors.25 Only Bate has no need to admit exceptions to the universally working prin ciple of immanent change. But the point is that the excep tions are not important. As Brunetiere put it, "There have also been writers who have wished to do 'the same thing' as their predecessors. I am well aware of the fact! But in the history of literature and of art, they are pre cisely the writers who do not count."26 They do not count because literary histories are narratives of change; therefore, the works in which change is hardly visible must fall out of them. But also such writers lack merit and do not count qual itatively. "After much observation," Bloom concludes that "where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity . . . the poorer the poets involved."27 Even more than other literary his torians, immanent ones are strongly tempted to identify literary excellence with conspicuous novelty in tech nique or subject matter. This identification has often been brought as a reproach against the Russian Formal24 W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet ICambridge: Harvard UP, 1970) 4, 122. 25 Bloom, Poetics of Influence 82. 26 Brunetiere, Manual vii, £n.; my italics. 27 Bloom, Poetics of Influence 83.
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ists. Their critics argue that there is no necessary connec tion between defamiliarized form and literary excellence. Great works may be quite traditional in method and con tent and experimental ones may be trivial. 28 The major criticism of these immanent explanations has been that they are immanent; in other words, they iso late the development of literature from concrete, socio political conditions. "Fundamental shifts in literary tradition," to quote Jurij Striedter, often "cannot be ex plained except as responses to definite extraliterary situ ations."29 Marxist critics, such as Peter Medvedev and Kurt Konrad, make this argument, and so do sympathetic critics such as Striedter (70-75), Jauss, Erlich, and Frow (94) .30 We need not elaborate the criticism here, but it is interesting that immanent theories have themselves been explained as products of a historical context, both by the Formalists themselves and by their antagonists.31 According to some Marxist opponents, the Formalists project the modernist alienation of the artist from soci ety, itself a reflection of the class obsolescence of the bourgeois artist, as a theory of literary history. Or the argument might be cast in different terms: immanent the ories, historically considered, are a product of social and economic developments that compelled art either to be come a commodity or to move into the marginal posi2. See Rene Wellek, "The Fall of Literary History," in The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1982) 74. 29 Jurij Striedter, Literary Structure, Evolu tion, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism Reconsidered (Cambridge: Har vard UP, 1989) 73. The essay I quote, "The Formalist Theory of Prose and Literary Evolution," is reprinted from vol. 1, Texte der russischen Formalisten lxxiv. 30 The views of Konrad are summarized in Striedter 1 15- 16; those of other Marxist critics of the Formalists in Victor Erlich, Russian For malism: History-Doctrine, 3d. ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1965); see also Erlich 198; and H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982) 18, 107. 31 Boris Eikhenbaum, "The Literary Life," in Texte der russischen Formalisten 1:465. For discussion see Frow 1 16.
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tions, in relation to society, of soi-disant autonomy or opposition. Immanent explanations assume that the au tonomy of art, which modern artists claim, is really the case. By the Formalist theory alone, one cannot explain the direction of literary change.32 Bate and Bloom are less exposed to this criticism. Bate sees in modern literature a progressive "retrenchment" toward "refinement, nuance, indirection, and finally, through the continued pressure for difference, into the various forms of anti-art" ( 10). Bloom, who is more deterministic, envisions a vague, nec essary "diminishment of poetry. "33 By the Formalist the ories, only two different principles of construction would be required through all time. As one became automa tized, the other would announce itself, and when it in turn was automatized, the previous one would again emerge. To account for the enormous number of princi ples of construction that have actually appeared, addi tional explanation is needed, and the Formalist theory cannot provide it.34 These immanent explanations depend on question able assumptions about the psychology of writers. More over, the Formalists and Bloom assume that persons who are not writers may and should read as writers do, thus expanding their theories of literary history into theories about reading. Bloom's various books are more directly on this subject than on literary influence or history. Only Bate makes crystal clear that he distinguishes between the mental acts and preoccupations of writers as they read and 32 The point is made by Yury Tynyanov and Roman Jakobson in "Prob· lems in the Study of Literature and Language" (1928): to explain the actual path of literary change when several paths are open, there must be "an analysis of the correlations between the literary series and other his· torical series." Readings in R ussian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystna Pomorska (Cambridge: MIT P, 1971) 8l. 33 Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 10. 34 Compare Bakhtin/Medvedev 163.
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those of ordinary persons (22-23) . Whether writers actu ally do read in the ways described can only be surmised. The theories of reading put forward by the Russian Formalists and Bloom are normative rather than descrip tive. They imagine the act of reading as it ought to be among writers, critics, and a certain, indefinite segment of other readers - those, namely, who are capable of the processes described. Literature, the argument goes, is created and must be read in relation to other literature. The literature of any time, says Tynyanov, forms a syn chronic system in which all elements are correlated and affect each other reciprocally, and "there can be no inves tigation of literary phenomena outside of their interrela tionships."35 That a fact exists as a literary fact depends on its differential quality, as Tynyanov says (441), and this is apparent only when it is viewed within the system that produced it. A poem, Bloom argues, is engendered by a parent poem. The reader, then, must acquire an objectively accu rate awareness of the system of literature as it was when the work was created. Since it is assumed that the writer possessed this awareness, we can simply say that the reader must see the system or the parent poem as the writer saw it. The function and aesthetic achievement of a work cannot be understood if the work is placed in some other context or considered in isolation. Presum ably the ignorant may be allowed their enjoyments of lit erature, but their responses have, by these theories, no importance. When I had not yet read many poems, all were different or defamiliarized, which is perhaps why I loved them all. Ignorance is bliss. Since this was puberty, I was especially stirred by love poems, which shows that we intensely perceive not only what is different but, even more, what we are interested in.36 35 Yury Tynyanov, "On Literary Evolution," in Texte der russischen Formalisten 1:447. 36 Compare Bakhtin/Medvedev 156.
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Though immanent explanations require that we adopt the point of view of writers, this is not always pos sible or especially desirable. If the Formalists and Bloom correctly described the sort of reading we must do in order to explain literary history, they would still be wrong in generalizing their theories into prescriptions for reading in general. For these theorists, the principle of literary change is not only the need. of writers to be different but also their active rejection of predecessors. Literary succession takes place with and by means of antagonism and strife. Previ ous works are in some sense a threat, Bate observes, both practically to our possibilities of productivity and psycho logically to our self-esteem. Though Bate does not empha size this, it is implicit in his thought that the latecomer may feel the Nietzschean ressentiment of the anxious toward the free. If a certain style - this is Tynyanov's way of putting it- has become dominant, it will be attacked. "We can speak of succession by inheritance," Tynyanov says, "only with the appearance of a school, of epigones, but not with the phenomena of literary evolution, the principle of which is strife and succession."37 For Bloom, the principle of literary change lies in the oedipal strug gle of poets with predecessors as fathers. A poet creates a poem by misunderstanding the poem of a predecessor. This "misprision" of the "parent poem" may be conscious or unconscious, but, in some sense, it is willful. It is nec essary to the creation of the new poem and partly deter mines its form and content. Even Brunetiere, though a nineteenth-century critic, could perceive literary history as conflict. Led by his anal ogy of literary history to Darwinian evolution, he specu lated, in phrases that must have been suggestive to the Formalists, that genres compete with each other like nat ural species, one taking over subject matter that had belonged to a different genre, or one displacing another in 37 Tynyanov, "The Literary Fact" 40l.
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the hierarchy of genres. "If it is true that the struggle for life is never more bitter than between neighboring spe cies, do not a host of examples offer themselves to re mind us that it is not otherwise in the history of litera ture and of art."38 Difference, strife, and the third element is discontinu ity. Literary evolution, for these theorists, takes place by jumps. It is not evolution, Tynyanov says, "but displace ment."39 "Poetry must leap," Bloom echoes, "it must locate itself in a discontinuous universe . . . . Discontin uity is freedom."40 The position reverses traditional assumptions. In the nineteenth century, literary histori ans traced continuous transition within an organic, evolv ing whole or, at least, a development in which one phase prepares and leads to the next. They emphasized that a writer or a work is born in a milieu that conditions and forms. Before a work is created, its horizon of possibility is already limited, its structure and mentality partly determined, for it evolves directly from what already exists. Our theorists concede this. "What happens," says Bloom, "if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of tradition? Why, nothing at all happens . . . . You cannot write or teach or think or even read without imitation."41 Which is to say that in every new work there is continuity as well as difference from past literary works. As literary historians, we em phasize one or the other, but what we emphasize is a per sonal choice, expressing our own values, not anything objectively knowable about the historical process. To emphasize strife and discontinuity defamiliarizes literary history. This, in fact, is the second major advan tage of immanent explanations. They promote narrative coherence and additionally, for our generation, they bring 38 Brunetiere, I.:Evolution des genres 22. 39 Tynyanov, "The Literary Fact" 395. 40 Bloom, Poetics of Influence 96. 41 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford UP, 1975)
32.
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phenomena into view that have not been sufficiently per ceived. To Bate, for example, we owe a new emphasis on the importance, for understanding literary change, of grasping the point of view of writers, especially the prob lems created for them by the mountain of past works. From Bloom comes the additional, fruitful reminder that poetic influence takes place not by reading but by mis reading, by "misprision" or misunderstanding the texts of the past. These, I think, are permanent additions to the nexus of ideas by which the course of literary change can be explained. And though Bloom unnecessarily limits the concept of influence to only those relations with other poets that involve conflict, he has called attention to the variety of these struggles and of their outcomes. The Russian Formalists contribute their clear recogni tion that there can be no definition of literature as such that is valid for all epochs.42 What is considered to be lit erature depends on time and place. The intimate letter is a literary genre in some epochs, but in others it falls into the realm of private life outside of literature.43 Tynyanov argues that the literature of any time is a synchronic sys tem and that over time systems succeed each other. (This argument is opposed in postmodern emphases on the anomalous and heterogeneous in any moment of literary history.) Some elements of a system may reappear in its successor; others may not. The same form may have an altered function in the context or system of a different epoch. In the age of Spenser, the romance has a cognitive and ethical function, and is close to epic. In the age of Wil liam Morris, its function is escapist; the functions it fulfilled for Spenser are assigned to other genres. 42 Compare Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1972) 250-51: "History tells us that there is no such thing as a timeless essence of literature, but under the rubric of 'literature' . . . a process of very different forms, functions, institu tions, reasons, and projects whose relativity it is precisely the his torian's responsibility to discern." 43 Tynyanov, "The Literary Fact" 417-23.
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The proper subject of literary history is not the succes sion of works but the succession of systems, for to describe the work without describing the system in which it func tions is meaningless. When an element of a system changes, or the function of an element, the whole system changes correlatively. Succession, therefore, is discontin uous; a system takes the place of the previous one.44 When this happens, not only the marginal elements of the sys tem but also the central ones may have altered; the previ ously central elements may move to the margin or dis appear altogether. Epic and dramatic tragedy exemplify genres central to literary systems that have now vanished. According to Tynyanov, genres are the elements of lit erary systems and are themselves also systems whose ele ments and their functions change over time. Meter was once the defining characteristic of poetry, the criterion by which the genre of poetry was distinguished from prose. In the age of free verse, meter is no longer a central ele ment and no longer serves the same functions.45 The lit erary system of a given time is not one in which all elements interact as equals. Rather, some are dominant, and others are deformed by this dominance.46 For exam ple, in England, the lyric was the dominant genre in the early nineteenth century. Hence the lyrical ballads, lyri cal dramas (such as Shelley's Prometheus Unbound), and lyrical novels of that age; the pull of the dominant genre affected the others.47 So also within genres. When meter (including rhyme) was the dominant element of poetry, the other elements were subordinated. One sees this in the poetry of the age of Tennyson, which perpetually sacrifices diction and syntax to the necessities of meter. One genre displaces another in the position of domi44 Ibid. 395-97. 45 Tynyanov, "On Literary Evolution" 441-43. 46 Ibid. 451 . 4 7 Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New
York: Oxford UP, 1988), has investigated some aspects of this phenome· non for the English romantic period.
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nance and so, also, within genres, with their elements. In most novels the description of landscape has connecting or retarding functions; in some epochs, however, it might be the motivation for the novels. In this case, the plots would be designed to secure occasions for landscape description.48 When a technique becomes automatized, the genre must change. Either a familiar technique acquires a new function, or the correlation (dominance) of elements alters,49 or new elements are incorporated, or an entirely new construction is made out of old and new elements. Often the successor genre adopts and combines elements from the "backyards and lowlands" of literature or from the speech materials of extraliterary existence. 50 Obviously there is contradiction between the con cepts of automatization and of discontinuity, since auto matization and defamiliarization are represented as processes taking place within literary systems. What will eventually be welcomed as defamiliarization may at first be perceived within the current system as error, as an ille gitimate departure from norms. In other words, though Tynyanov initially denied con tinuous transition between systems, he admitted it within them. A year later, however, in eight theses writ ten jointly with Roman Jakobson, he overcame this contradiction: "The opposition between synchrony and diachrony was an opposition between the concept of sys tem and the concept of evolution; thus it loses its impor tance in principle as soon as we recognize that every system necessarily exists as an evolution, whereas, on the other hand, evolution is inescapably of a systemic 48 Tynyanov, "On Literary Evolution" 443. 49 This idea was anticipated by Ferdinand Brunetiere in rEvolution
de la poesie lyrique en France aux dix-neuvieme siecle. 10th ed. (Paris: Hachette, n.d.) 2:288: development is "the new disposition of identical elements; a 'change of front' . . . a modification of the relations which keep the parts of the same whole together." 50 Tynyanov, "The Literary Fact" 399.
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nature."5l Though systems are synchronic, they are in pro cess, never static. But, the assumption of discontinuity justifies itself heuristically, as a source of insights, and the theories of Tynyanov amount to a program for a reveal ing type of literary historiography. Until now, the theories of Tynyanov have not had much practical impact on the writing of literary histo ries. One reason is, perhaps, that they have not been widely known. Moreover, they could not be influential in this moment of revived historical contextualism. A third reason, however, is that they make the writing of literary history very difficult. Historical contextualism is an acceptable method of scholarship precisely because its necessary incompleteness can be acknowledged. Every one knows that the whole context can never be known or represented, and most people assume, often incorrectly, that to exhibit just a piece of the context may be more illuminating than it is distorting. But according to the immanent theory of Tynyanov, to abstract some elements from a total structure or system, and to ignore the spe cific function of these elements within the system, are typical errors of traditional literary history. The very con cept of tradition, for example, "proves to be the unjus tified abstraction of one or more of the literary elements of a given system . . . and the consolidating of these with exactly the same elements of another system, in which they possess a different 'emploi,' to form a supposedly unified, apparently unbroken series."52 In other words, Tynyanov puts so much emphasis on structure, on the cor relation and interaction of parts within a system that, in contrast to contextual explanations, he could not think it useful to perceive only an area of the system. Following 51 Tynyanov and Jakobson, "Problems in the Study of Literature and Language" 80. In "On Literary Evolution," published a year earlier, Tyn· yanov had maintained that "the concept of a steadily evolving syn· chronic system is a contradiction" 449. 52 Tynyanov, "On Literary Evolution" 437.
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his prescriptions, literary historians would have to com pare system with system. Thus Tynyanov's theory would impose an extraordi nary amount of reading and reflection. One notes that Bloom's immanent theory, which is much simpler to carry into practice, has been used as a basis for literary histories, for example, the one by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. It requires only that we compare a text with a few previous texts. Presumably the type of literary history envisioned by Tynyanov will be created gradually by many persons over a period of time. Of course, such a literary history, if it is ever pro duced, will not be a complete explanation. Tynyanov does not utterly deny the value of "research into the psychol ogy of the author and the building of a causal bridge from the milieu, from the life of the author outside literature and from his class position to his works" (457). But as the reductive phrasing leads one to expect, he advances a Medusa's head of arguments to diminish the importance of such considerations. Nevertheless, they remain impor tant, even in Tynyanov's final formulations, and any sophisticated literary history must now draw on both immanent and contextual considerations.
8 The Functions of Literary History
IN HIS GREAT ESSAY ON THE ADVANTAGE AND DIS advantage of History for Life, Nietzsche criticizes our modern surfeit of historical knowledge. What distin guishes the present age from all past ones, he says, is that we know so much more about them than they did about each other. This knowledge is unhealthy. ''Alien and dis connected" images from many times and places, a "carni val of gods, customs, and arts" fill our minds as a spectacle, but none are felt to be ours. As they collide in our minds, they are all relativized, and so also are what ever convictions and values characterize the present moment in history. Existence can be truly vital only within a closed horizon, ar�es Nietzsche; without this, a person, a people, and an age are threatened with "the dangerous disposition of irony with regard to itself, and from this the still more dangerous one of cynicism."l I of course am the type of historical critic Nietzsche scorns. I have encountered this same analysis of the modern mind repeatedly in essays by Paul Bourget, Hugo von Hof mannsthal, and many others from the turn of the cen tury, in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and derivative poems and novels since, and in the latest accounts of post modern culture. I do not believe it. In me, as Nietzsche 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of His tory for Life. trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980) 28, 10.
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would have predicted, the only effect of his argument is to provoke criticism of it, and this chapter is inspired by Nietzsche because it is conceived against him. As a relativizing historian, I see of course that Nietz sche's antitheses and hierarchy of values -his contrasts of belief and irony, life and knowledge, the closed horizon and the carnival of ideas, with the exalting of the former- are cliches of romantic cultural nostalgia. Few persons, if given a choice, would actually prefer to live within a closed hori zon. I note the irony and paradox with which Nietzsche himself speaks of those who live "unhistorically/' that is, without knowledge of history. They are, he says, like rosy cheeked Alpine rustics, "a pleasure to behold"; or like the herd of cattle peacefully grazing; or, descending further the biological scale, like trees contented with their roots ( 1 1, 8, 20). Furthermore, as Nietzsche points out, it is only histor ical knowledge - his study of ancient Greece - that gives him a vantage point outside the historicist culture he attacks, enabling him to see it and criticize it. Thus Nietz sche is, as always, himself the man he criticizes, the ironi cal and historical consciousness. Yet Nietzsche has asked the right question -what is the advantage and disadvantage of history for life ? - and in this he is admirable, for many theorists refuse to face the issues he raises. Paul Veyne, for example, maintains that the study of history is an intellectual pleasure "identical with mere curiosity." Its goal is "knowing for the sake of , knowing/ and it has no effects on the way one feels or lives. Outside the library, says Veyne, a historian eats, votes, and "professes sound doctrines" just like other peo ple.2 We might similarly argue that the questions literary history addresses are of great interest in themselves - the problem of literary change, why? and how?; the problem of context, of the impact on literature of political and social realities. To pursue such questions, we need no justifica2 Paul Veyne, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore·Rinvo1ucri (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1984) 64.
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tion. It is enough to say that, having intellects, we are curi ous. Or we might argue that literary history seeks a system atic understanding of relations. It explores the similarities, influences, threads of filiation, and the like, that link authors and texts, and thus it structures the past. The understanding of works that literary history achieves is a disciplinary one and has at least a formal claim to being an objective understanding. In our modern world, understand ing must be disciplinary and systematic if it is to be persua sive. Yet these points concern the function of literary history as knowledge only. Nietzsche scorns the "pure thinkers who" are "satisfied with mere knowledge, whose only goal is the increase of knowledge" (23). He probes the impact of this knowledge on feeling and action, and I shall try to emulate him with respect to knowledge of literary history. The function of literary history cannot be quite the same as that of history, whatever the latter's function may be. There is, to be sure, a kind of literary history that is indistinguishable from history or historical sociology, and it fulfills the same functions. Veyne describes it very well as a "history of literary life and taste": "Who read, who wrote? What was read and what was the conception of literature and writers? What were the rituals, the roles, and the roads taken by literary life ? What writers, great or lesser, created fashions, were imitated?" (67). Most liter ary histories include information of this kind, but it is not their chief concern. If it were, they would not much interest literary readers. Literary history differs from history because the works it considers are felt to have a value quite different from and often far transcending their significance as a part of history. In other words, literary history is also literary crit icism. Its aim is not merely to reconstruct and understand the past, for it has a further end, which is to illuminate lit erary works. It seeks to explain how and why a work acquired its form and themes and, thus, to help readers orient themselves. It subserves the appreciation of litera-
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ture. The function of literary history lies partly in its impact on reading. We write literary history because we want to explain, understand, and enjoy literary works. Thus, while the necessities of historical explanation select what texts are included in the narratives of literary history, so also do other criteria that may broadly and vaguely be termed aesthetic. Because it is so deeply pen etrated and determined by critical aims and evaluations, literary history seems to many historians a loose, compro mised type of history, and one of the earliest literary his torians, Georg Gervinus, who had first been trained as a historian, declared that evaluations had no place in this type of discourse. He was almost the last literary histo rian to make this claim, and Gervinus's history is as thor oughly shaped by unstated critical evaluations as are all others. Before developing his attack on the consciousness sat urated with history, Nietzsche notes three positive uses of history for life that have obvious correlatives in liter ary history. The first chapter of this book mentions what Nietzsche calls critical history. Trampling all pieties under foot, this "puts the knife" to some portion of the past, judges, and annihilates it. " It is an attempt," Nietz sche shrewdly remarks, "a posteriori to give oneself a past from which one would like to be descended in opposition to the past from which one is descended" (22). Such liter ary history serves the needs of writers in the present, and examples of it are legion. We can cite T. S. Eliot's essays that praise poets of the seventeenth century while scoffing at Shelley, Byron, Tennyson, and the romantic tra dition generally. Nietzsche's monumental history corresponds to the type of literary history that concentrates on the greatest of past writers and seeks inspiration from them. Its ap proach to literature might be called humanist, since it hopes to support not only writers in their art but readers in living. For example, in his famous sonnet "To a Friend," Matthew Arnold praises Sophocles, who "saw
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life steadily, and saw it whole," and the speaker hopes, through reading Sophocles "in these bad days," to be infused with his "even-balanced soul." When literary his tory is written with this attitude, it assumes, in Nietz sche's words, that "the great moments . . . of humanity are linked throughout millennia," that "what is highest in such a moment of the distant past" is "still alive, bright and great," and can be made our own ( 1 5). Friedrich Schlegel's 1812 lectures on poetry might be cited as an example. Monumental literary histories that dwell only on the greatest works are rare, but passages of monu mental criticism are common. In these passages, the his torian urges that literary and human greatness "was at least possible once," as Nietzsche says, "and may well again be possible," and the reader "goes his way more cour ageously" ( 16). This book has not considered critical or monumental literary history, for neither type pursues or values the aim of most literary histories, which is to offer a plau sible version of past events. Both are deliberately "unjust" to the past, as Nietzsche puts it. Critical literary history deliberately rejects a historical point of view. It does not perceive the literature of the past in relation to the time and place that produced it, but selects, interprets, and evaluates this literature only from the standpoint of the present and its needs. Because monumental literary history concentrates only on the greatest authors and texts, the past itself, says Nietzsche, "suffers damage: very great portions of the past are forgotten and despised, and flow away like a grey uninterrupted flood, and only single embellished facts stand out as islands" ( 1 7). Even the islands, moreover, are myths. ''As long as the soul of historiography is found in the great incentives a powerful man receives from it, as long as the past must be described as something worthy of imitation . . . so long, at least, is the past in danger of being somewhat distorted, of being reinterpreted accord ing to aesthetic criteria and so brought closer to fiction"
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( 17). In other words, monumental history must ignore aspects of the past that would render a writer or work less inspirational. I am not thinking only of the retouch ing of the past, as when we brush over class feelings, anti Semitism, patriarchal attitudes, and so on, but of the sub tler distortion that comes in making the past enough like the present for its example to be relevant. "How much that is different must be overlooked," Nietzsche points out, "how ruthlessly must the individuality of the past be forced into a general form and have all its sharp edges broken" if monumental history is to have its powerful effect ( 16)! A function of many literary histories has been to sup port feelings of community and identity. In his sonnet that begins " It is not to be thought of that the Flood," Wordsworth writes, We must be free or die, who speak the tongue That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold Which Milton held.
In other words, Wordsworth believes that there is a tradi tion and a canon of English literature, and that they help to create the language, religion, morality, and politics of England in his time. If Shakespeare and Milton still speak to us, the reason is that they have been factors in forming our contemporary civilization and hence our selves. We identify with them and, hence, with each other, for we feel that Shakespeare and Milton are mutu ally ours. If we no longer responded to Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth says, we would not be the same peo ple; our identity would have changed. Wordsworth's view of tradition and its function is shared by many literary historians, and it is explicitly set forth and defended by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method. It applies, mutatis mutandis, not only to national traditions but to those that form the consciousness of any social group. In this view, a history of literature, whether it be the literature of a nation, class, region,
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race, or gender, would help instruct us who we are individ ually and as a community. It displays the tradition in which we stand whether we will or no, for this tradition has formed us. In fact, however, literary histories deal in a rather differ ent way with tradition. When Wilhelm Scherer, for exam ple, describes the Minnesinger, he intends that his con temporary German readers should identify with these medieval poets as German, but as he foregrounds certain qualities in these poets and ignores others, he is defining Germanness in a certain way. In other words, he reshapes the tradition in accordance with his own values; he spe cifies German identity as he would like it to be; and he hopes that, in doing so, he will have an effect in modifying the character of Germans. Traditions and identities exist, and literary historians try to discern them, but essentially they are ideas in dispute, and as literary historians de scribe them, they seek to remake the present. I stress that histories of the literatures of regions, social classes, women, ethnic groups, and so on have the same functions as the national literary histories of the nineteenth century. They assert that the group in ques tion has a literary tradition and that the works in it are valuable. Thus, in the strife of cultural politics, they con fer cultural importance on the social group. They create a sense of continuity between past members of the group and present ones and, by describing a shared past, rein force the sense of community in the present. They define the identity of the group in a certain way in opposition to other definitions of this contested concept. To members of the group, this definition has extreme importance, since it affects the way a person views himself and is viewed by others. This literary history that traces a tradition corre sponds in some ways to the type of history Nietzsche calls piously antiquarian. The antiquarian historian looks back "with loyalty and love" to the portion of the past from which he derives. But in doing so he distorts the
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past, for he is interested only in what lies within his own tradition and greets even its mediocre achievements with enthusiasm. "The antiquarian . . . has an extremely lim ited field of vision; by far the most is not seen at all, and the little that is seen is seen too closely . . . [he] cannot apply a standard and therefore takes . . . each individual thing to be too important" ( 19-20). Critical, monumental, and antiquarian literary histo ries fulfill their functions by misrepresenting the past. If it is true, as I have argued, that literary history cannot depict the past as it actually was, objective representation cannot possibly be its function. Hence we might swing to the other extreme, and maintain that the function of lit erary history is to produce useful fictions about the past. More exactly, it projects the present into the past and should do so; it makes the past reflect our concerns and support our intentions. Here, certainly, we identify pro cesses that take place in all literary histories. Yet such misrepresentations, valuable and necessary though they may be, are not the most important function. To claim otherwise would seriously misstate the aims of most lit erary historians. What is worse, it would grossly simplify the actual effects of literary history. Most literary historians strive - impossibly- for an objective understanding of the past and would modify their critical, monumental, or antiquarian assertions if they perceive a conflict between these and what they believe is actually the case. The question we must ask is, what would be the function of a reliable literary history if it could be written? I have already indicated the usual answer: historical knowledge helps us to better under stand, appreciate, or enjoy what we read. It reveals the background that makes the work meaningful and the aes thetic that makes it beautiful. Literary histories explain allusions in texts, establish the expectations associated with a genre in a given time and place, show how a work broke through a general crisis in aesthetic construction,
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demonstrate that it served or subverted a dominant ideol ogy, and so forth. This answer is correct, obvious, and states important functions of literary history. But it is also somewhat superficial and must be considered more deeply. For one cannot know just enough literary history to yield the helpful gloss. To orient a text toward the time and place that produced it alters our reading of it radically. Imag ine, for example, the difference between medieval respon ses to the poems of Virgil and those of modern classical philologists. Works we read unhistorically speak to us directly or not at all. We do not take them as characteris tic of a time and place, but as true or false, beautiful or ugly, moving or irrelevant. In other words, the medieval reader interpreted Virgil within his own frame of refer ence, for he had no idea that there was any other frame of reference. As a result, he made Virgil's texts address his own concerns, find him immediately, speak thoughts and feelings he could share. In youth we are all naive, unhis torical readers. At age fourteen we do not place and explain a sonnet as the expression of courtly love conven tions; it is a moving utterance of an emotion we identify with. Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat expresses not the skeptical hedonism that was typical of late Victorian poets but the melancholy truths of life. As adults we are still more or less unhistorical when we read works from cultures or from pasts about which we know little.3 When a text is placed in literary history, seen as 3 See Hans·Georg Gadamer, 7luth and Method (New York: Cross· road, 1989) 270: "The text that is understood historically is forced to abandon its claim that it is uttering something true. We think we under· stand when we see the past from a historical standpoint, i.e. place our· selves in the historical situation and seek to reconstruct the historical horizon. In fact, however, we have given up the claim to find, in the past, any truth valid and intelligible for ourselves. This acknowledgement of the otherness of the other, which makes him the object of objective knowledge, involves the fundamental suspension of his claim to truth."
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belonging to the past, and especially to a past about which we are informed, it becomes at once a part of a world that is not our own. It locates itself at a distance from ourselves and is viewed as the expression of an alien mentality. This, to emphasize, is our immediate orienta tion. It may change if we find that the text does after all speak directly to us as if from our own world. But our first expectation, created by modern historiography, is that the lived experience uttering itself in the text will be very different from ours. Moreover, a literary history views a work as part of a group of works, within a narrative that may contain many works and systems of them. Often the many works discussed are radically diverse, yet in most cases the liter ary historian views them more or less impartially. For these reasons, literary history tends to prevent us from strongly identifying with any single work. It forms responses that are relativized and somewhat detached. "To take everything objectively," says Nietzsche ironi cally, "not to be angered by anything, to love nothing, to comprehend everything, how gentle and pliable this makes one!" (48). To many readers it will seem that if this is true, liter ary history comes at a very high cost. But would they pre fer the closed horizon Nietzsche feigns to endorse? If literary history tends to prevent us, in some degree, from completely committing ourselves to any work, it compen sates by activating in us a dialogue with the past. Thus a literary work becomes a more complicated experience, aesthetically and intellectually, even if it also becomes a less immediately relevant one. And there are many works -whole periods -that we could not and would not read without the mediation of literary history. Thus, to learn to read with the perspective of literary history is like growing up. We encounter a wider, more diverse world of books, expressing mentalities that challenge us by their difference. A text from the past embodies a lived experience, an
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aesthetic, a culture that is alien. Of course, it is not com pletely alien. Continuities and universals in human expe rience are the themes of antiquarian literary history and humanist criticism. But most literary histories empha size the difference of the past. Taine writing as a French man on English literature, Nietzsche on the birth of tragedy in ancient Greece, Benjamin on the German Trauerspiel of the seventeenth century, Greenblatt on the English Renaissance are - it goes without saying- mis representing the past and reading their own mentality into it, but they are also studying a time, place, and cul ture that they assume to be very unlike their own. They are trying to perceive, understand, and explain it as accu rately as they can. As literary historians they undergo, and make us experience with them, the shock to values, the effort of imagination, the crisis for understanding and sympathy of every profound encounter with the past that seeks to be objective. Here, incidentally, is why literary history cannot surrender the ideal of objective knowledge of the past. Though the ideal cannot be achieved, we must pursue it, for without it the otherness of the past would entirely deliquesce in endless subjective and ideo logical reappropriations. A function of literary history is, then, to set the literature of the past at a distance, to make its otherness felt. Some readers will object that the past, if thus repre sented, becomes merely an aesthetic spectacle. It enter tains, perhaps it expands imagination, but literary his tory, so conceived, could have no impact on the present or the future. To meet this objection we must recall the opening of Nietzsche's essay. A purpose of teaching in the humanities, it is usually said, is to keep the past alive, to make it a part of present consciousness. If we ask why this is desirable, one answer is that we do not want to be prisoners of the present. The cultural diversity of the past can be viewed as a set of options, a reminder of alternatives and possibili ties. A literary historian is usually a specialist in some
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past age. In imagination he inhabits that other time and place as well as his own. He sympathizes with its values and ideals. Often this state of mind is described pejora tively as escapist, and indeed, many a specialist has no effect on the present except to disturb the dust of a library. But the specialist is a citizen of two ages and, thus, can bring one to bear critically on the other. Nietzsche makes this point when he says that his training as a classical philologist puts him into an "untimely" relation to the present. His statement can be generalized as a function of literary history. "Only so far as I am the nursling of more ancient times, especially the Greek," he says, ,icould I come to have such untimely experiences about myself as a child of the present age." For "I do not know what meaning classical philology would have for our age if not to have an untimely effect within it, that is, to act against the age and so have an effect on the age to the advantage, it is to be hoped, of a coming age" (8).
INDEX
Abbas, Ackbar, 1 7 n Abrams, Meyer H., 93-94, 103, 106-7, 109 Adams, Robert, 8 1 Addison, Joseph, 7 5 Adorno, Theodor, 1 , 134 Aesthetic movement, 83-84, 115 Alexandrian canon, 70, 7 1 Allen, Donald, 75-76 Andrian, Leopold von, 82-84 Annales school, 1 1, 65 Arnold, Matthew, 44-45, 97, 178-79 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 75 Auerbach, Erich, 40 Babbitt, Irving, 99 Bagehot, Walter, 97 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 80, 159n, 166 n Barth, John, 107 n Barthes, Roland, 4, 8, 169 n Bate, Walter Jackson, 39, 159, 162-63, 165-67, 169 Beers, Henry A., 101-2, 1 10 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 81, 84, 129, 185 Bernhardy, Gottfried, 72 Berry, Francis, 82n Black Mountain school, 75, 76 Blake, William, 88
Bloom, Harold, 1, 33, 137, 138; on influence and intertextuality, 153, 159, 160, 163, 165-69, 1 73 Bloomsbury group, 75 Bode, G. H., 7 1 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 144-45, 147 Boone, Joseph, 33 Bormann, Alexander von, 61 Bourget, Paul, 175 Bradley, F. H., 130 Brandes, Georg, 3, 4-5, 29-30; on the point of departure, 36 Braudel, F., 142 Breslin, James E. B., 32 Brooks, Cleanth, 143 Brooks, Van Wyck, 39 Brown, Marshall, 36 Brunetiere, Ferdinand, on causes of literary change, 153-55, 159, 161, 167, 171 n Burger, Peter, 104-5 Burke, Edmund, 94 Bush, Douglas, 142-44 Bush, Ronald, 38 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 99, 105, 109 Cambridge History of American Literature, 6, 40-41 Cambridge History of Classical Literature, 69-72, 74
187
188
Index
Canons, literary, 129-30 Carlyle, Thomas, 55-56 Cary, Elizabeth, 111 Cavalier poets, 81-82 Cazamian, Louis, 6, 157 Chase, Cynthia, 86 n Christ, Carol, 37n Classifications, literary, 3-4, 20, 61-84, 110-19; aporias in, 8-9; criteria of validity, 112-19; determinants of, 69; elements of, 87; external facts as a basis for, 74-76, 91; formal require ments as a basis for, 82-84; hermeneutic circle in, 73, 85, 91, 113-14; observation of texts as a basis for, 76-79, 91 Cockney school, 88-89, 111-12 Cohen, Ralph, 64n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, classi fied with Lake School, 74-75, 88-89, 97, 99, 103 Colie, Rosalie 1., 63n, 79, 80 Columbia Literary History of the United States, 3, 15, 56-57 Conrady, Karl Otto, 22 Contextual explanation, 9-10, 21, 59, 121-52, 1 58-59; mediation, problem of, 131-33 Courthope, William John, 98-100 Cox, James M., 56 Crane, Ronald S., 12, 46, 64n, 66n, 130, 132 Croce, Benedetto, 4, 12, 78; cri tique of literary history, 8, 18, 62, 64, 66, 76, 1 12, 117 Czech Structuralism, 64, 159 Daiches, David, 31, 32 Danto, Arthur, 35, 48 Darwin, Charles, 1 Deconstruction, critique of literary history in, 8, 18, 66 Dekker, Thomas, 129 De Man, Paul, 8 n, 17 n
Derrida, Jacques, 8 n D e Sanctis, Francesco, 3, 29 Dewey, J., 98 Dickinson, Emily, Gilbert and Gubar on, 137, 139 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 91, 92, 123, 125; on developmental history, 2; on Geistesgeschichte, 134, 140-41, 143; on Hegel's dialec tical method, 51; on logical subjects, 3, 1 1 1; on Novalis, 122, 139-40, 149; on periodiza tion, 66, 141-42; on representa tion, 18; on teleology, 38 Dixon, Richard Watson, 98 Donne, John, 117 Dowden, Edward, 102-3, 109-10 Dryden, John, 115 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 164n Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 75, 117, 130-31 Erlich, Victor, 164 Evans, B. Hor, 53-54 Faguet, Emile, 7 Fiedler, Leslie, 107 n Fitzgerald, Edward, 183 Forget, Philippe, 67 Foucault, Michel, I, 11, 49, 64n, 65, 74, 148 Fowler, Alastair, 63n, 131 n; on Renaissance georgic, 79-80; on Wittgenstein's "family resem blance," 77-78 French Revolution, and interpre tation of Romanticism, 90, 94-95, 99-103, 105, 109-10 Freud, Sigmund, 131 Frow, John, 64n, 157n, 164 Frye, Northrop, 155 Futurists, 115 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 38n, 115, 183 n; on tradition, 180-81
Index Gaillard, Fran"oise, 65n Garnett, Richard, 97 Gates, Lewis E., 101-2 Geertz, Clifford, 1 Geistesgeschichte, 134, 140-41, 143, ISS-56, 158 Genres, 62, 79-81, 1 15; changes in, 171; in systems, 169-71 Georgian poets, 75 Georgic poetry, 79-80 Gervinus, Georg Gottfried, 130, 1 78 Gilbert, Sandra, 122, 123, 133, 136-39, 142, 146, 173 Ginsberg, Allen, 115 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 124, 130 Gombrich, E. H., 157 Gosse, Edmund, 38, 97 Gray, Thomas, scheme for a his tory of English poetry, 92 Greenblatt, Stephen, 123-24, 142, 185; Shakespearean Negotia tions, 148-51 Grimminger, Rolf, 50, 127n Gruppe, 47, 1 1 5 Gubar, Susan, 122, 123, 133, 136-39, 142, 173 Guillen, Claudio, 64n, 65, 66n, 80 Habermas, Jiirgen, 107 n Hancock, Albert Elmer, 103, 109-10 Hankiss, Elemer, 156n Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Harriot, Thomas, 148, 150 Harsnett, Samuel, 148, 149, 150-51 Hassan, lhab, 107n Hazlitt, William, 103, 109; classi fied with Cockney school, 88 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 133, 143, 156
189
Herder, Johann Gottfried, I, 93; '�lcaeus und Sappho," 71 Herford, C. H., 101-2, 110 Hernaudi, Paul, 63n Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 82-84, 175 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 130 Hollier, Denis, 57 Homer, 14; Robert Wood on, 134-35 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 98 Howard, Jean E., 128 Howe, Irving, 107n Hulme, T. E., 156 Hunt, Leigh, 94n; classified with Cockney school, 88, 1 12; " Young Poets," 96 Ideology, criticism of, 9, 10, 66 Imagism, as a literary classifica tion, 63, 66, 75, 1 15, 1 16, 118 Immanent explanation, theories of, 9, 21, 153-73; Bate, W. J., 159, 162-63, 165-67, 169; Bloom, Harold, 153, 159, 160, 163, 165-69, 1 73; Brunetiere, F., 153-55, 159, 161, 163, 167, 1 7 1 n; critique of, 164-67; cycles of literature, 155-58; decline of literature, 157, 159; discontinuity in literary change, 168, 1 70; organic anal ogies, ISS, 158; oscillation between poles, 156, 158; Rus sian Formalists, 1 53-54, 159-73; teleology in literary development, 157 Iser, Wolfgang, 47-48 Jakobson, Roman, 165, 171-72 Jameson, Fredric, 32, 134, 139 n Japp, Uwe, 12n, 1 8 n, 19n, 64n, 65, 128 Jauss, Hans Robert, 23-27, 164; on Marxist explanation, 126 n
190
Index
Jeffrey, Francis, 96-97, 109; analy sis of his own age, 94-95; on history of poetry, 93; on Lake School, 88-91 Johnson, Samuel, 17 Jonson, Ben, "sons" of, 75, 8 1-82, 115 Jusserand, J. J., 6-7 Keats, John, 88, 96, 1 12, 129-30, 161 Keble, John, 14 Kermode, Frank, 107 n Konrad, Kurt, 164 Korff, H. A., 2n Koselleck, Reinhart, 15 Kostelanetz, Richard, 107n Kummer, Friedrich, 141 n LaCapra, Dominick, lOn, 35 n, 124n Lake School, 74-75, 88-91, 97 Lamb, Charles, 88-89 Lanson, Gustave, 8, 58 Lanyer, Amelia, I I I Levin, Harry, 107n Levi-Strauss, Claude, 11, 65 Lewalski, Barbara K., 64n Lewis, C. S., 142-44 Linnaeus, Carolus, 68 Literary history: conceptual, 49-51, 121; critiques of, in nineteenth century, 7; develop mental, 2; emplotment in, 39, 42-43; encyclopedic, 20, 53-60, 122; explanation of, 20-21, 45-47, 121-73; func tions of, 12-13, 1 75-86; his tory of, as a discipline, 1 - 1 1, 19; and modernist narrative techniques, 48-49; narrative, 2, 3, 5, 20, 29-51, 53; partisan ship in, 30, 31 -33; plausibility as criterion of, 16-17; point of view in, 13-14, 31-32; positiv-
ist, 7-8, 15; postmodem, 3, 20, 56-60, 65-66; selection of materials for, 5-6, 3l. See also Contextual explanation; Ideol ogy, criticism of; Immanent explanation; New Historicism; Periodization; Period styles; Reception history Litz, Walton, 56 Liu, Alan, lOn, 105, 107-8, HO, 123, 142, 144-48, 149 Lloyd, Charles, 89 Lockhart, John Gibson, 88 Lovejoy, A. O. 103-4 Lowes, John Livingston, 156 Lukacs, Georg, 40, 50, 51, 132 Lyotard, Jean-Franyois, 107 n McGann, Jerome, 22-23, 1 10, 135, 138; on "romantic ideology," 104-5 McKeon, Michael, 50-51 Mannheim, Karl, 59 Martin, Wallace, 40 Martindale, Colin, 132n Marx, Karl, 141 Masson, David, 97 Matthiessen, F. 0., 69 Medvedev, M. M., 159n, 166 n Medvedev, Peter, 164 Meredith, George, 33 Metaphysical poets, 81, 1 1 7 Meyer, Eduard, 3 8 Milton, John, Wordsworth on, 180 Mink, Louis 0., 49 n Moir, David, 98 Morley, Henry, 6 n, 97 Mukaiovsky, Jan, H, 132n Miiller, Harro, 65 n Miiller, K. 0., 71-72 Nelson, Cary, 56 New Criticism, 8, 18, 104 New Historicism, 9, 144-52
Index
191
New History of French Literature, 3, 57-60 New York poets, 76 Nicoll, Allardyce, 78-79 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 34, 167; On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life, 21, 175-86; The Birth of Itagedy, 3, 1 85 Novalis, Dilthey on, 122, 139-40
credo of historical objectivity, 15; on suprapersonal individu als, 3 Romance genre, 169 Romanticism, as a literary classification, 62, 85-119 Rothstein, Eric, 80-81 Rushton, William, 98 Russian Formalism, 8, l l, 26, 64, 153-54, 1 59-73
Objectivism, US Oliphant, Margaret, 97
Saintsbury, George, 29, 33, 97 San Francisco Renaissance, 76 Sartre, Jean Paul, I I Scherer, Edmond, 7 Scherer, Wilhelm, 3, 37, ISS, 157-58, 181 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, I , 2, 9, 93; on classicism and romanticism, 87, 99 Schlegel, Friedrich von, I, 2, 5, 9, 93, 179; on classicism and romanticism, 87, 99; on Greek culture, 156; "Von den Schulen der Griechen und Romer," 71 Schmid, Wilhelm, 72 Schmidt, Julian, 30, 49-50 Schmidt, Siegfried J., 1 8 n, 64n; on periodization, 67 Schools, literary, 92 Schorske, Carl, 82-84 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 124, 133 Scott, Sir Walter, 99 Shairp, J. c., 99 Shakespeare, William, 14, 129; Stephen Greenblatt on, 148-51; Wordsworth on, 180 Shaw, Thomas Budd, 98 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88, 96, 97, 99, 103, lOS, 109; his history of poetry, 93; on literary periods, 92 Shklovsky, Viktor, 153, 154, 162 Sidney, Mary, 1 1 1 Sidney, Sir Philip, 73-74
Parker, Mark, 87n Parnassians, 115 Pater, Walter, 97, 98, 101 Pepper, Stephen, 1 24, 125 Periodization, 36-37, 58, 61, 64-67; Dilthey on, 141-42; in Romantic age, 91-96 Period styles, 1 8 Petersen, Julius, 141 n Phelps, William Lyon, 101-2 PIeiade, 115 Plett, H. E, 24 n Plotz, Judith, 1 5 7 n Pope, Alexander, 1 15; scheme for a history of English poetry, 92 Postmodernism, 107-8 Pound, Ezra, 75, 130 Prendergast, Christopher, 35 n, 48 Pre-Raphaelites, 75, 115 Rahv, Philip, 107 n Ranke, Leopold von, 139n, 162 Reception history, 9, 14, 23-27, 65 Renaissance, as a literary classifi cation, 143 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 129-30; classified with Cockney school, 88, 96, 112 Richardson, Charles, 5-6 Ricoeur, Paul, 35 n, 42, 45-46; on
192
Index
Simpson, David, 105 Siskin, Clifford, 64n, 86n, 170n Slawinski, Janusz, 65n Smith, William, 98 Sontag, Susan, 107 n Southey, Robert, 97; classified with Lake School, 75, 88-90 Spence, Donald, 34 Spender, Stephen, 107 n Spengler, Oswald, 1 "Spirit of the age," 93-96, 106-7 Stiihlin, Otto, 72 Steele, Sir Richard, 75 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 97 Stevens, Wallace, 146 Strelka, J. P., 63n Strich, Fritz, 157 Striedter, Jurij, 164 Structuralism, 1 1 Suckling, Sir John, 8 1 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 97 Symons, Arthur, 1 1 7 Szondi, Peter, 4n Taine, Hippolyte, 3, 29, 154, 185; on romantic school, 96-97 Teesing, H. P. H., 91-92, 162 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 170 Thucydides, 38 Tillyard, E. M. w., 127 Tomkins, Jane P., 128 n Tynyanov, Yury, 1 1, 160, 162, 165 n, 166-73 Uhlig, Claus, 2 1-22 Unger, Rudolf, 139 n Van Doren, Carl, 40-41 Vaughan, C. E., 101-2, 110
Veyne, Paul, 176, 1 77 Virgil, 183 Vodicka, Felix, 1 1 Warren, Austin, 64n, 66n Watt, Ian, 36, 50 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 101, 1 10 Weber, Max, 1, 125n Wechssler, Edward, 83, 141 n Weimann, Robert, 27n Weisinger, Herbert, 8 7 n Weisstein, Ulrich, 64n, 65, 70 n Wellek, Rene, 12, 83n, 93, 127n, 131 n, 141, 142, 164n; on peri odization, 64-65, 66n, 67, 91 -92; on romanticism, 86, lOOn, 109 Wendell, Barrett, 5-6 Whalley, George, 86, 8 8 n, 91, lOOn White, Hayden, 11, 34, 42, 108, 124n, 125 Whitman, Walt, 1 1 5 Wilson, John, 88, 94 n, 95-96, 109 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, on "family resemblance," 77-78 Wolf, Friedrich August, 70, 72 W6lfflin, Heinrich, 1, 156, 158 Wolfson, Susan, 37 Wood, Robert, 122, 123, 134-35, 138, 146, 149 Woolf, Virginia, 40 Wordsworth, William, 36, 180; classified with Lake School, 74-75, 88-89, 97, 99, 105, 109; Liu on, 144-48 Worth, Lady Mary, 1 1 1 Yeats, William Butler, 155
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"In a period increasingly concerned with literature and his
tory, with literature in history, and with history in litera ture, David Perkins's timely new book turns attention to the history of literature. Arguing that literary history is impossible yet necessary, he surveys many approaches to the ideal of accounting for our literary past. Wide-ranging, judicious, and committed, the book shows problems and pitfalls alongside prospects and possibilities. Examining cat egorization, contextualization, modeling, and explanation in literary history, Perkins's interrogations should make all literary scholars think more clearly about some of their fun damental gestures. It will be a forceful, yet graceful spur to the hardest kind of knowledge, which is self-knowledge. "
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